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NOTES ON LIFE 
AND LETTERS 




1 

BOOKS BY JOSEPH CONRAD 



ALMAYER'S FOLLY 

AN OUTCAST OF THE ISLANDS 

THE NIGGER OF THE "NARCISSUS" 

TALES OF UNREST 

LORD JIM: A ROMANCE 

YOUTH: A NARRATIVE 

TYPHOON 

FALK, AND OTHER STORIES 

NOSTROMO: A TALE OF THE SEABOARD 

THE MIRROR OF THE SEA 

THE SECRET AGENT 

A SET OF SIX 

UNDER WESTERN EYES 

A PERSONAL RECORD 

'TWIXT LAND AND SEA 

CHANCE 

WITHIN THE TIDES 

VICTORY 

THE SHADOW-LINE 

THE ARROW OF GOLD 

THE RESCUE 

NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

WITH FORD M. HUEFFER 
ROMANCE: A NOVEL 
THE INHERITORS: AN EXTRAVAGANT 
STORY 



!>'' 



NOTES ON LIFE 
AND LETTERS 



BY 
JOSEPH CONRAD 



/ 




GARDEN CITY, N. Y. , AND TORONTO 

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 

1921 



c^p/^ 






COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY 
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION 
INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN 

COPTRIGHT, 1904, BY NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW CORPORATION 
COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 

MAy 12 m\ 1/ 

\ 

0)Cl.A6l4391ty 



I 

I 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 

I don't know whether I ought to offer an apology 
for this collection which has more to do with life than 
with letters. Its appeal is made to orderly minds. 
This, to be frank about it, is a process of tidying up, 
which, from the nature of things, cannot be regarded 
as premature. The fact is that I wanted to do it myself 
because of a feeling that had nothing to do with the con- 
siderations of worthiness or un worthiness of the small 
(but unbroken) pieces collected within the covers of this 
volume. Of course it may be said that I might have 
taken up a broom and used it without saying anything 
about it. That certainly is one way of tidying up. 

But it would have been too much to have expected 
me to treat all this matter as removable rubbish. All 
those things had a place in my life. Whether any of 
them deserve to have been picked up and ranged on 
the shelf — this shelf — I cannot say, and, frankly, I have 
not allowed my mind to dwell on the question. I was 
afraid of thinking myself into a mood that would 
hurt my feelings; for those pieces of writing, whatever 
may be the comment on their display, appertain to the 
character of the man. 

And so here they are, dusted, which was but a decent 
thing to do, but in no way polished, extending from the 
the year '98 to the year '20, a thin array (for such a 
stretch of time) of really innocent attitudes: Conrad 
literary, Conrad political, Conrad reminiscent, Conrad 



vi AUTHOR'S NOTE 

controversial. Well, yes! A one-man show— or is it 
merely the show of one man? 

The only thing that will not be found amongst those | 
Figures and Things that have passed away, will be 
Conrad en pantoujles. It is constitutional inability. 
Schlafrock und pantoffeln! Not that! Never! ^ . . . 
I don't know whether I dare boast like a certain South 
American general who used to say that no emergency of 
war or peace had ever found him "with his boots off;" i 
but I may say that whenever the various periodicals ' 
mentioned in this book, called on me to come out and 
blow the trumpet of personal opinions or strike the 
pensive lute that speaks of the past, I always tried to || 
pull on my boots first. I didn't want to do it, God 
knows! Their Editors, to whom I beg to offer my 
thanks here, made me perform mainly by kindness but 
partly by bribery. Well, yes! Bribery. What can you I 
expect ? I never pretended to be better than the people ' ' 
in the next street or even in the same street. 

This volume (including these embarrassed introduc- 
tory remarks) is as near as I shall ever come to deshabille 
in public; and perhaps it will do something to help 
towards a better vision of the man, if it gives no more 
than a partial view of a piece of his back, a little dusty 
(after the process of tidying up), a little bowed, and re- 
ceding from the world not because of weariness or misan- 
thropy but for other reasons that cannot be helped: 
because the leaves fall, the water flows, the clock ticks 
with that horrid pitiless solemnity which you must have 
observed in the ticking of the hall clock at home. For 
reasons like that. Yes! It recedes. And this was the 
chance to afford one more view of it — even to my own 

eyes. 

The section within this volume called Letters ex- 
plains itself though I do not pretend to say that 



AUTHOR'S NOTE vii 

justifies its own existence. It claims nothing in its 
defence except the right of speech which I believe be- 
longs to everybody outside a Trappist monastery. The 
part I have ventured, for shortness' sake, to call Life, 
may perhaps justify itself by the emotional sincerity of 
the feelings to which the various papers included under 
that head owe their origin. And as they relate to 
events of which everyone has a date, they are in the 
nature of sign-posts pointing out the direction my 
thoughts were compelled to take at the various cross- 
roads. If anybody detects any sort of consistency in 
the choice this will be only proof positive that wisdom 
had nothing to do with it. Whether right or wrong, 
instinct alone is invariable; a fact which only adds a 
deeper shade to its inherent mystery. The appearance 
of intellectuality these pieces may present at first sight 
is merely the result of the arrangement of words. The 
logic that may be found there is only the logic of the 
language. But I need not labour the point. There 
will be plenty of people sagacious enough to perceive 
the absence of all wisdom from these pages. But I 
believe suflSciently in human sympathies to imagine 
that very few will question their sincerity. Whatever 
delusions I may have suffered from I have had no delu- 
sions as to the nature of the facts commented on here. 
I may have misjudged their import: but that is the 
sort of error for which one may expect a certain amount 
of toleration. 

The only paper of this collection which has never been 
published before is the Note on the Polish Problem. It 
was written at the request of a friend to be shown pri- 
vately, and its "Protectorate" idea, sprung from a 
strong sense of the critical nature of the situation, was 
shaped by the actual circumstances of the time. The 
time was about a month before the entrance of Rou- 



viii AUTHOR'S NOTE 

mania into the war, and though, honestly, I had seen! 
already the shadow of coming events I could not permit * 
my misgivings to enter into and destroy the structure 
of my plan. I still believe that there was some sense in 
it. It may certainly be charged with the appearance 
of lack of faith and it lays itself open to the throwing 
of many stones ; but my object was practical and I had 
to consider warily the preconceived notions of the 
people to whom it was implicitly addressed and also 
their unjustifiable hopes. They were unjustifiable, but 
who was to tell them that? I mean who was wise 
enough and convincing enough to show them the inanity 
of their mental attitude? The whole atmosphere was 
poisoned with visions that were not so much false as 
simply impossible. They were also the result of vague 
and unconfessed fears, and that made their strength. 
For myself, with a very definite dread in my heart, I 
was careful not to allude to their character because I 
did not want the Note to be thrown away unread. And 
then I had to remember that the impossible has some- 
times the trick of coming to pass to the confusion of 
minds and often to the crushing of hearts. 

Of the other papers I have nothing special to say. 
They are what they are, and I am by now too hardened 
a sinner to feel ashamed of insignificant indiscretions. 
And as to their appearance in this form I claim that in- 
dulgence to which all sinners against themselves are 
entitled. 

1920. J. C. 



PAGE 



CONTENTS 

PART I-LETTERS 

Books 3 

Speaker 

Henry' James . 11 

North American Review 

Alphonse Daudet 20 

Outlook 

Guy de Maupassant 25 

Anatole France . 82 

(I.) Speaker: (II.) English Review. 

TURGENEV 45 

Stephen Crane: A Note without Dates . . 49 
London Mercury 

Tales of the Sea 53 

Outlook 

An Observer in Malaya 58 

Academy 

A Happy Wanderer 61 

Daily Mail 

The Life Beyond 66 

Daily Mail 

The Ascending Effort . 71 

Daily Mail 



X CONTENTS 



PAGE 



The Censor of Plays 76 

Daily Mail 

PART II— LIFE 

Autocracy and War 83 

Fortnightly Review 

The Crime of Partition 115 

Fortnightly Review 

Note on the Polish Problem 134 

Poland Revisited 141 

Daily News 

First News 174 

Reveille 

"Well Done" 179 

Daily Chronicle 

Tradition 194 

Daily Mail 

Confidence 202 

Golden Daily Mail 

Flight 209 

Fledgling 

Some Reflections on the Loss of the "Ti- 
tanic" 213 

English Review 

Certain Aspects op the Admirable Inquiry . 229 

English Review 

Protection of Ocean Liners 249 

Illustrated London News 

A Friendly Place 260 

Daily Mail • 



PART I 
LETTERS 




NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

BOOKS 

1905 



"I HAVE not read this author's books, and if I 
have read them I have forgotten what they were 
about. " 

These words are reported as having been uttered in 
our midst not a hundred years ago, pubHcly, from the 
seat of justice, by a civic magistrate. The words of our 
municipal rulers have a solemnity and importance far 
above the words of other mortals, because our municipal 
rulers more than any other variety of our governors and 
masters represent the average wisdom, temperament, 
sense and virtue of the community. This generalisa- 
tion, it ought to be promptly said in the interests of 
eternal justice (and recent friendship), does not apply to 
the United States of America. There, if one may be- 
lieve the long and helpless indignations of their daily and 
weekly Press, the majority of municipal rulers appear 
to be thieves of a particularly irrepressible sort. But 
this by the way. My concern is with a statement 
issuing from the average temperament and the average 
wisdom of a great and wealthy community, and uttered 
by a civic magistrate obviously without fear and with- 
out reproach. 

3 



NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 



I confess I am pleased with his temper, which is that 
of prudence. "I have not read the books," he says, and 
immediately he adds, "and if I have read them I have 
forgotten." This is excellent caution. And I like his 
style: it is unartificial and bears the stamp of manly I i 
sincerity. As a reported piece of prose this declaration 
is easy to read and not difficult to believe. Many books 
have not been read; still more have been forgotten. As 
a piece of civic oratory this declaration is strikingly 
effective. Calculated to fall in with the bent of the 
popular mind, so familiar with all forms of forgetful- 
ness, it has also the power to stir up a subtle emotion 
while it starts a train of thought — and what great 
force can be expected from human speech? But it is 
in naturalness that this declaration is perfectly de- 
lightful, for there is nothing more natural than for a 
grave City Father to forget what the books he has read 
once — long ago — in his giddy youth may be — were 
about. 

And the books in question are novels, or, at any rate, 
were written as novels. I proceed thus cautiously 
(following my illustrious example) because being with- 
out fear and desiring to remain as far as possible 
without reproach, I confess at once that I have not 
read them. 

I have not; and of the million persons or more who 
are said to have read them, I never met one yet with 
the talent of lucid exposition sufficiently developed to-, 
give me a connected account of what they are about. ' 
But they are books, part and parcel of humanity, and 
as such, in their ever-increasing, jostling multitude, they 
are worthy of regard, admiration, and compassion. Aj 

Especially of compassion. It has been said a long 
time ago that books have their fate. They have, and i 
is very much like the destiny of man. They share with 



BOOKS 5 

us the great incertitude of ignominy or glory — of severe 
justice and senseless persecution — of calumny and mis- 
understanding — the shame of undeserved success. Of 
all the inanimate objects, of all men's creations, books 
are the nearest to us, for they contain our very thought, 
our ambitions, our indignations, our illusions, our 
fidelity to truth, and our persistent leaning towards 
error. But most of all they resemble us in their pre- 
carious hold on life. A bridge constructed according 
to the rules of the art of bridge-building is certain of a 
long, honourable and useful career. But a book as 
good in its way as the bridge may perish obscurely on 
the very day of its birth. The art of their creators is 
not sufficient to give them more than a moment of life. 
Of the books born from the restlessness, the inspiration, 
and the vanity of human minds those that the Muses 
would love best lie more than all others under the 
menace of an early death. Sometimes their defects will 
save them. Sometimes a book fair to see may — to use 
a lofty expression — have no individual soul. Obviously 
a book of that sort cannot die. It can only crumble into 
dust. But the best of books drawing sustenance from 
the sympathy and memory of men have lived on the 
brink of destruction, for men's memories are short, and 
their sympathy is, we must admit, a very fluctuating, 
unprincipled emotion. 

No secret of eternal life for our books can be found 
amongst the formulas of art, any more than for our 
bodies in a prescribed combination of drugs. This is 
not because some books are not worthy of enduring life, 
but because the formulas of art are dependent on things 
variable, unstable and untrustworthy; on human 
sympathies, on prejudices, on likes and dislikes, on the 
sense of virtue and the sense of propriety, on beliefs 
and theories that, indestructible in themselves, always 



6 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

change their form — often in the Hfetime of one fleeting 
generation. 

II 

Of all books, novels, which the Muses should love, 
make a serious claim on our compassion. The art of 
the novelist is simple. At the same time it is the most 
elusive of all creative arts, the most liable to be ob- 
scured by the scruples of its servants and votaries, the 
one pre-eminently destined to bring trouble to the mind 
and the heart of the artist. After all, the creation of a 
world is not a small undertaking except perhaps to the 
divinely gifted. In truth every novelist must begin 
by creating for himself a world, great or little, in which 
he can honestly believe. This world cannot be made 
otherwise than in his own image: it is fated to remain 
individual and a little mysterious, and yet it must re- 
semble something already familiar to the experience, 
the thoughts and the sensations of his readers. At the 
heart of fiction, even the least worthy of the name, some 
sort of truth can be found — if only the truth of a child- 
ish theatrical ardour in the game of life, as in the novels 
of Dumas the father. But the fair truth of human 
delicacy can be found in Mr. Henry James's novels; 
and the comical, appalling truth of human rapacity let 
loose amongst the spoils of existence lives in the mon- 
strous world created by Balzac. The pursuit of happi- 
ness by means lawful and unlawful, through resignation 
or revolt, by the clever manipulation of conventions 
or by solenm hanging on to the skirts of the latest 
scientific theory, is the only theme that can be legiti- 
mately developed by the novelist who is the chronicler 
of the adventures of mankind amongst the dangers of the 
kingdom of the earth. And the kingdom of this earth 
itself, the ground upon which his individualities stand, 



BOOKS 7 

stumble, or die, must enter into his scheme of faithful 
record. To encompass all this in one harmonious con- 
ception is a great feat; and even to attempt it de- 
liberately with serious intention, not from the senseless 
prompting of an ignorant heart, is an honourable 
ambition. For it requires some courage to step in 
calmly where fools may be eager to rush. As a dis- 
tinguished and successful French novelist once observed 
of fiction, "C'est un art trop difficile." 

It is natural that the novelist should doubt his ability 
to cope with his task. He imagines it more gigantic 
than it is. And yet literary creation being only one of 
the legitimate forms of human activity has no value but 
on the condition of not excluding the fullest recognition 
of all the more distinct forms of action. This condition 
is sometimes forgotten by the man of letters, who often, 
especially in his youth, is inclined to lay a claim of ex- 
clusive superiority for his own amongst all the other 
tasks of the human mind. The mass of verse and 
prose may glimmer here and there with the glow of a 
divine spark, but in the sum of human effort it has no 
special importance. There is no justificative formula 
for its existence any more than for any other artistic 
achievement. With the rest of them it is destined to be 
forgotten, without, perhaps, leaving the faintest trace. 
Where a novelist has an advantage over the workers in 
other fields of thought is in his privilege of freedom — 
the freedom of expression and the freedom of confessing 
his innermost beliefs — which should console him for the 
hard slavery of the pen. 

Ill 

Liberty of imagination should be the most pre- 
cious possession of a novelist. To try voluntarily 



8 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

to discover the fettering dogmas of some romantic, 
realistic, or naturalistic creed in the free work of its own 
inspiration, is a trick worthy of human perverseness 
which, after inventing an absurdity, endeavours to find 
for it a pedigree of distinguished ancestors. It is a 
weakness of inferior minds when it is not the cunning 
device of those who, uncertain of their talent, would seek 
to add lustre to it by the authority of a school. Such, 
for instance, are the high priests who have proclaimed 
Stendhal for a prophet of Naturalism. But Stendhal 
himself would have accepted no limitation of his free- 
dom. Stendhal's mind was of the first order. His 
spirit above must be raging with a peculiarly Stendhal- 
esque scorn and indignation. For the truth is that 
more than one kind of intellectual cowardice hides be- 
hind the literary formulas. And Stendhal was pre- 
eminently courageous. He wrote his two great novels, 
which so few people have read, in a spirit of fearless 
liberty. 4 

It must not be supposed that I claim for the artist in 
fiction the freedom of moral Nihilism. I would require 
from him many acts of faith of which the first would be 
the cherishing of an undying hope; and hope, it will not 
be contested, implies all the piety of effort and re- 
nunciation. It is the God-sent form of trust in the 
magic force and inspiration belonging to the life of this 
earth. We are inclined to forget that the way of ex- 
cellence is in the intellectual, as distinguished from 
emotional, humility. What one feels so hopelessly 
barren in declared pessimism is just its arrogance. It 
seems as if the discovery made by many men at various 
times that there is much evil in the world were a source 
of proud and unholy joy unto some of the modern 
writers. That frame of mind is not the proper one in 
which to approach seriously the art of fiction. It gives 



I 

I 

II 



BOOKS 9 

an author — goodness only knows why — an elated sense 
of his own superiority. And there is nothing more 
dangerous than such an elation to that absolute loyalty 
towards his feelings and sensations an author should 
keep hold of in his most exalted moments of creation. 
To be hopeful in an artistic sense it is not necessary to 
think that the world is good. It is enough to believe 
that there is no impossibility of its being made so. 
If the flight of imaginative thought may be allowed 
to rise superior to many moralities current amongst 
mankind, a novelist who would think himself of a 
superior essence to other men would miss the first 
condition of his calling. To have the gift of words is no 
such great matter. A man furnished with a long-range 
weapon does not become a hunter or a warrior by the 
mere possession of a fire-arm; many other qualities 
of character and temperament are necessary to make 
him either one or the other. Of him from whose 
armoury of phrases one in a hundred thousand may 
perhaps hit the far-distant and elusive mark of art I 
would ask that in his deahngs with mankind he should 
be capable of giving a tender recognition to their obscure 
virtues. I would not have him impatient with their 
small failings and scornful of their errors. I would not 
have him expect too much gratitude from that humanity 
whose fate, as illustrated in individuals, it is open to 
him to depict as ridiculous or terrible. I would wish 
him to look with a large forgiveness at men's ideas and 
prejudices, which are by no means the outcome of 
malevolence, but depend on their education, their 
social status, even their professions. The good artist 
should expect no recognition of his toil and no admira- 
tion of his genius, because his toil can with difficulty be 
appraised and his genius cannot possibly mean anything 
to the illiterate who, even from the dreadful wisdom of 



10 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

their evoked dead, have, so far, culled nothing but 
inanities and platitudes. I would wish him to en- 
large his sympathies by patient and loving observation 
while he grows in mental power. It is in the impartial 
practice of life, if anywhere, that the promise of per- 
fection for his art can be found, rather than in the ab- 
surd formulas trying to prescribe this or that particular 
method of technique or conception. Let him mature 
the strength of his imagination amongst the things of 
this earth, which it is his business to cherish and know, 
and refrain from calling down his inspiration ready- 
made from some heaven of perfections of which he 
knows nothing. And I would not grudge him the 
proud illusion that will come sometimes to a writer : the 
illusion that his achievement has almost equalled the 
greatness of his dream. For what else could give him 
the serenity and the force to hug to his breast as a thing 
delightful and human, the virtue, the rectitude and 
sagacity of his own City, declaring with simple elo- 
quence through the mouth of a Conscript Father: "I 
have not read this author's books, and if I have read 
them I have forgotten . . . ." 



HENRY JAIVIES 

An Appreciation 
1905 

The critical faculty hesitates before the magnitude 
of Mr. Henry James's work. His books stand on my 
shelves in a place whose accessibility proclaims the 
habit of frequent communion. But not all his books. 
There is no collected edition to date, such as some of 
"our masters" have been provided with; no neat rows 
of volumes in buckram or half calf, putting forth a 
hasty claim to completeness, and conveying to my 
mind a hint of finality, of a surrender to fate of that 
field in which all these victories have been won. Noth- 
ing of the sort has been done for Mr. Henry James's 
victories in England. 

In a world such as ours, so painful with all sorts 
of wonders, one would not exhaust oneself in barren 
marvelling over mere bindings, had not the fact, or 
rather the absence of the material fact, prominent in 
the case of other men whose writing counts (for good or 
evil) — ^had it not been, I say, expressive of a direct truth 
spiritual and intellectual; an accident of — I suppose — ■ 
the publishing business acquiring a symbohc meaning 
from its negative nature. Because, emphatically, in 
the body of Mr. Henry James's work there is no sug- 
gestion of finality, nowhere a hint of surrender, or even 
of probability of surrender, to his own victorious 
achievement in that field where he is a master. Hap- 

11 



n NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

pily, he will never be able to claim completeness; and, 
were he to confess to it in a moment of self-ignorance, 
he would not be believed by the very minds for whom 
such a confession naturally would be meant. It is 
impossible to think of Mr. Henry James becoming 
"complete" otherwise than by the brutality of our 
common fate whose finality is meaningless— in the sense 
of its logic being of a material order, the logic of a falling 

stone. 

I do not know into what brand of ink Mr. Henry 

James dips his pen; indeed, I heard that of late he had 

been dictating; but I know that his mind is steeped in 

the waters flowing from the fountain of intellectual 

youth. The thing — a privilege — a miracle — what you 

will — is not quite hidden from the meanest of us who 

run as we read. To those who have the grace to stay 

their feet it is manifest. After some twenty years of 

attentive acquaintance with Mr. Henry James's work, 

it grows into absolute conviction which, all personal 

feeling apart, brings a sense of happiness into one's 

artistic existence. If gratitude, as someone defined it, 

is a lively sense of favours to come, it becomes very easy 

to be grateful to the author of ''The Ambassadors"— 

to name the latest of his works. The favours are sure 

to come; the spring of that benevolence will never run 

dry. The stream of inspiration flows brimful in a 

predetermined direction, unaffected by the periods 

of drought, untroubled in its clearness by the storms of 

the land of letters, without languor or violence in its^ 

force, never runnmg back upon itself, opening new' 

visions at every turn of its course through that richly 

inhabited country its fertility has created for our 

delectation, for our judgment, for our exploring. It is, 

in fact, a magic spring. 

With this phrase the metaphor of the perennial 



HENRY JAMES 13 

spring, of the inextinguishable youth, of running waters, 
as appHed to Mr. Henry James's inspiration, may be 
dropped. In its volume and force the body of his work 
may be compared rather to a majestic river. All 
creative art is magic, is evocation of the imseen in forms 
persuasive, enlightening, familiar and surprising, for 
the edification of mankind, pinned down by the con- 
ditions of its existence to the earnest consideration of 
the most insignificant tides of reality. 

Action in its essence, the creative art of a writer of 
fiction may be compared to rescue work carried out in 
darkness against cross gusts of wind swaying the action 
of a great multitude. It is rescue work, this snatching 
of vanishing phases of turbulence, disguised in fair 
words, out of the native obscurity into a light where the 
struggling forms may be seen, seized upon, endowed 
with the only possible form of permanence in this world 
of relative values — the permanence of memory. And 
the multitude feels it obscurely too; since the demand 
of the individual to the artist is, in effect, the cry 
"Take me out of myself!" meaning really, out of my 
perishable activity into the light of imperishable con- 
sciousness. But everything is relative, and the light 
of consciousness is only enduring, merely the most en- 
during of the things of this earth, imperishable only as 
against the short-lived work of our industrious hands. 

When the last aqueduct shall have crumbled to 
pieces, the last airship fallen to the ground, the last 
blade of grass have died upon a dying earth, man, 
indomitable by his training in resistance to misery 
and pain, shall set this undiminished light of his eyes 
against the feeble glow of the sun. The artistic faculty, 
of which each of us has a minute grain, may find its 
voice in some individual of that last group, gifted with 
a power of expression and courageous enough to 



14 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

interpret the ultimate experience of mankind in terms 
of his temperament, in terms of art. I do not mean to 
say that he would attempt to beguile the last moments 
of humanity by an ingenious tale. It would be too 
much to expect — from humanity. I doubt the heroism I 
of the hearers. As to the heroism of the artist, no doubt 
is necessary. There would be on his part no heroism. || 
The artist in his calling of interpreter creates (the 
clearest form of demonstration) because he must. He 
is so much of a voice that, for him, silence is like death; l| 
and the postulate was, that there is a group alive, clus- 
tered on his threshold to watch the last flicker of light 
on a black sky, to hear the last word uttered in the 
stilled workshop of the earth. It is safe to affirm that, 
if anybody, it will be the imaginative man who would 
be moved to speak on the eve of that day without 
to-morrow — whether in austere exhortation or in a 
phrase of sardonic comment, who can guess .^^ 

For my own part, from a short and cursory acquain- 
tance with my kind, I am inclined to think that the last 
utterance will formulate, strange as it may appear, some 
hope now to us utterly inconceivable. For mankind is 
delightful in its pride, its assurance, and its indomitable 
tenacity. It will sleep on the battlefield among its own 
dead, in the manner of an army having won a barren 
victory. It will not know when it is beaten. And 
perhaps it is right in that quality. The victories are 
not, perhaps, so barren as it may appear from a purely 
strategical, utilitarian point of view. Mr. Henry 
James seems to hold that belief. Nobody has rendered 
better, perhaps, the tenacity of temper, or known how 
to drape the robe of spiritual honour about the drooping 
form of a victor in a barren strife. And the honour is 
always well won; for the struggles Mr. Henry James 
chronicles with such subtle and direct insight are. 



HENRY JAMES 15 

though only personal contests, desperate in their silence, 
none the less heroic (in the modern sense) for the ab- 
sence of shouted watchwords, clash of arms and sound 
of trumpets. Those are adventures in which only 
choice souls are ever involved. And Mr. Henry 
James records them with a fearless and insistent 
fidelity to the peripeties of the contest, and the feeling 
of the combatants. 

The fiercest excitements of a romance "c?^ cape et 
d' epee," the romance of yard-arm and boarding pike 
so dear to youth, whose knowledge of action (as of other 
things) is imperfect and limited, are matched, for the 
quickening of our maturer years, by the tasks set, by 
the difficulties presented, to the sense of truth, of 
necessity — before all, of conduct — of Mr. Henry 
James's men and women. His mankind is delightful. 
It is delightful in its tenacity; it refuses to own itself 
beaten; it will sleep on the battlefield. These warlike 
images come by themselves under the pen; since from 
the duality of man's nature and the competition of 
individuals, the life-history of the earth must in the last 
instance be a history of a really very relentless warfare. 
Neither his fellows, nor his gods, nor his passions will 
leave a man alone. In virtue of these allies and 
enemies, he holds his precarious dominion, he possesses 
his fleeting significance; and it is this relation in all its 
manifestations, great and little, superficial or profound, 
and this relation alone, that is commented upon, inter- 
preted, demonstrated by the art of the novelist in the 
only possible way in which the task can be performed: 
by the independent creation of circumstance and 
character, achieved against all the difficulties of ex- 
pression, in an imaginative effort finding its inspira- 
tion from the reality of forms and sensations. That 
a sacrifice must be made, that something has to be 



16 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

given up, is the truth engraved in the innermost re- 
cesses of the fair temple built for our edification by the 
masters of fiction. There is no other secret behind 
the curtain. All adventure, all love, every success is 
resumed in the supreme energy of an act of renunciation. 
It is the uttermost limit of our power; it is the most | 
potent and effective force at our disposal on which rest 
the labours of a solitary man in his study, the rock on 
which have been built commonwealths whose might 
casts a dwarfing shadow upon two oceans. Like a 
natural force which is obscured as much as illuminated | 
by the multiplicity of phenomena, the power of re- j 
nunciation is obscured by the mass of weaknesses, ij 
vacillations, secondary motives and false steps and ! 
compromises which make up the sum of our activity. 
But no man or woman worthy of the name can pre- ! 
tend to anything more, to anything greater. And | 
Mr. Henry James's men and women are worthy of the i 
name, within the limits his art, so clear, so sure of 
itself, has drawn round their activities. He would be i 
the last to claim for them Titanic proportions. The 
earth itself has grown smaller in the course of ages. 
But in every sphere of human perplexities and emotions, I 
there are more greatnesses than one — not counting 
here the greatness of the artist himself. Wherever he 
stands, at the beginning or the end of things, a man has 
to sacrifice his gods to his passions or his passions to 
his gods. That is the problem, great enough, in all 
truth, if approached in the spirit of sincerity and 
knowledge. f 

In one of his critical studies, published some fifteen 
years ago, Mr. Henry James claims for the novelist 
the standing of the historian as the only adequate one, 
as for himself and before his audience. I think that 
the claim cannot be contested, and that the position is 



HENRY JAMES 17 

unassailable. Fiction is history, human history, or it is 
nothing. But it is also more than that; it stands on 
firmer ground, being based on the reality of forms and 
the observation of social phenomena, whereas history is 
based on documents, and the reading of print and hand- 
writing — on second-hand impression. Thus fiction is 
nearer truth. But let that pass. A historian may be 
an artist too, and a novelist is a historian, the preserver, 
the keeper, the expounder, of human experience. As 
is meet for a man of his descent and tradition, Mr. 
Henry James is the historian of fine consciences. 

Of course, this is a general statement; but I don't 
think its truth will be, or can be questioned. Its 
fault is that it leaves so much out; and, besides, 
Mr. Henry James is much too considerable to be 
put into the nutshell of a phrase. The fact remains 
that he has made his choice, and that his choice 
is justified up to the hilt by the success of his art. 
He has taken for himself the greater part. The 
range of a fine conscience covers more good and 
evil than the range of conscience which may be called, 
roughly, not fine; a conscience, less troubled by the nice 
discrimination of shades of conduct. A fine conscience 
is more concerned with essentials; its triumphs are more 
perfect, if less profitable, in a worldly sense. There is, 
in short, more truth in its working for a historian to de- 
tect and to show. It is a thing of infinite complication 
and suggestion. None of these escapes the art of Mr. 
Henry James. He has mastered the country, his do- 
main, not wild indeed, but full of romantic glimpses, of 
deep shadows and sunny places. There are no secrets 
left within his range. He has disclosed them as they 
should be disclosed — that is, beautifully. And, indeed, 
ugliness has but little place in this world of his creation. 
Yet it is always felt in the truthfulness of his art; it is 



18 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

there, it surrounds the scene, it presses close upon it. It 
is made visible, tangible, in the struggles, in the con- 
tacts of the fine consciences, in their perplexities, in the 
sophism of their mistakes. For a fine conscience is 
naturally a virtuous one. What is natural about it is 
just its fineness, and abiding sense of the intangible, 
ever-present, right. It is most visible in their ultimate 
triumph, in their emergence from miracle, through an 
energetic act of renunciation. Energetic, not violent; 
the distinction is wide, enormous, like that between 
substance and shadow. 

Through it all Mr. Henry James keeps a firm hold 
of the substance, of what is worth having, of what is 
worth holding. The contrary opinion has been, if not 
absolutely affirmed, then at least implied, with some 
frequency. To most of us, living willingly in a sort of 
intellectual moonlight, in the faintly reflected light of 
truth, the shadows so firmly renounced by Mr. Henry 
James's men and women, stand out endowed with 
extraordinary value, with a value so extraordinary that 
their rejection offends, by its uncalled-for scrupulous- 
ness, those business-like instincts which a careful 
Providence has implanted in our breasts. And, apart 
from that just cause of discontent, it is obvious that a 
solution by rejection must always present a certain lack 
of finality, especially startling when contrasted with 
the usual methods of solution by rewards and punish- 
ments, by crowned love, by fortune, by a broken leg or a 
sudden death. Why the reading public which, as a 
body, has never laid upon a story-teller the command to 
be an artist, should demand from him this sham of 
Divine Omnipotence, is utterly incomprehensible. But 
so it is; and these solutions are legitimate inasmuch as 
they satisfy the desire for finality, for which our hearts 
yearn, with a longing greater than the longing for the 



HENRY JAMES 19 

loaves and fishes of this earth. Perhaps the only true de- 
sire of mankind, coming thus to light in its hours of lei- 
sure, is to be set at rest. One is never set at rest by Mr. 
Henry James's novels. His books end as an episode in 
life ends. You remain with the sense of the life still 
going on; and even the subtle presence of the dead is 
felt in that silence that comes upon the artist-creation 
when the last word has been read. It is eminently 
satisfying, but it is not final. Mr. Henry James, 
great artist and faithful historian, never attempts the 
impossible. 



ALPHONSE DAUDET 

1898 

It is sweet to talk decorously of the dead who are 
part of our past, our indisputable possession. One must 
admit regretfully that to-day is but a scramble, that 
to-morrow may never come; it is only the precious 
yesterday that cannot be taken away from us. A gift 
from the dead, great and little, it makes life supportable, 
it almost makes one believe in a benevolent scheme of 
creation. And some kind of belief is very necessary. 
But the real knowledge of matters infinitely more pro- 
found than any conceivable scheme of creation is with 
the dead alone. That is why our talk about them 
should be as decorous as their silence. Their generosity 
and their discretion deserve nothing less at our hands; 
and they, who belong already to the unchangeable, 
would probably disdain to claim more than this from a 
mankind that changes its loves and its hates about 
every twenty-five years — at the coming of every new 
and wiser generation. 

One of the most generous of the dead is Daudet, who, 
with a prodigality approaching magnificence, gave him- 
self up to us without reserve in his work, with all his 
qualities and all his faults. Neither his qualities nor 
his faults were great, though they were by no means 
imperceptible. It is only his generosity that is out of 
the common. What strikes one most in his work is the 
disinterestedness of the toiler. With more talent than 
many bigger men, he did not preach about himself, he 

20 



ALPHONSE DAUDET 21 

did not attempt to persuade mankind into a belief of his 
own greatness. He never posed as a scientist or as a 
seer, not even as a prophet; and he neglected his 
interests to the point of never propounding a theory for 
the purpose of giving a tremendous significance to his 
art, alone of all things, in a world that, by some strange 
oversight, has not been supplied with an obvious mean- 
ing. Neither did he affect a passive attitude before 
the spectacle of life, an attitude which in gods — and in a 
rare mortal here and there — may appear godlike, but 
assumed by some men, causes one, very unwillingly, .to 
think of the melancholy quietude of an ape. He was 
not the wearisome expounder of this or that theory, 
here to-day and spumed to-morrow. He was not a 
great artist, he was not an artist at all, if you like — but 
he was Alphonse Daudet, a man as naively clear, hon- 
est, and vibrating as the sunshine of his native land; 
that regrettably undiscriminating sunshine which ma- 
tures grapes and pumpkins alike, and cannot, of course, 
obtain the commendation of the very select who look 
at life from under a parasol. 

Naturally, being a man from the South, he had a 
rather outspoken belief in himself, but his small dis- 
tinction, worth many a greater, was in not being in 
bondage to some vanishing creed. He was a worker 
who could not compel the admiration of the few, but 
who deserved the affection of the many; and he may 
be spoken of with tenderness and regret, for he is not 
immortal — he is only dead. During his life the simple 
man whose business it ought to have been to climb, 
in the name of Art, some elevation or other, was con- 
tent to remain below, on the plain, amongst his crea- 
tions, and take an eager part in those disasters, weak- 
nesses, and joys which are tragic enough in their droll 
way, but are by no means so momentous and profound 



22 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

as some writers — probably for the sake of Art — would 
like to make us believe. There is, when one thinks of 
it, a considerable want of candour in the august view of 
life. Without doubt a cautious reticence on the sub- 
ject, or even a delicately false suggestion thrown out in 
that direction is, in a way, praiseworthy, since it helps 
to uphold the dignity of man — a matter of great im- 
portance, as any one can see; still one cannot help feeling 
that a certain amount of sincerity would not be wholly 
blamable. To state, then, with studied moderation a 
belief that in unfortunate moments of lucidity is irre- 
sistibly borne in upon most of us — the blind agitation 
caused mostly by hunger and complicated by love 
and ferocity does not deserve either by its beauty, 
or its morality, or its possible results, the artistic fuss 
made over it. It may be consoling — for human folly is 
very bizarre — but it is scarcely honest to shout at those 
who struggle drowning in an insignificant pool: You 
are indeed admirable and great to be the victims of 
such a profound, of such a terrible ocean! 

And Daudet was honest; perhaps because he knew no 
better — but he was very honest. If he saw only the 
surface of things it is for the reason that most things 
have nothing but a surface. He did not pretend — per- 
haps because he did not know how — he did not pretend 
to see any depths in a life that is only a film of unsteady 
appearances stretched over regions deep indeed, but 
which have nothing to do with the half-truths, half- \ 
thoughts, and whole illusions of existence. The road to 
these distant regions does not lie through the domain of 
Art or the domain of Science where well-known voices 
quarrel noisily in a misty emptiness; it is a path of 
toilsome silence upon which travel men simple and un- 
known, with closed lips, or, may be, whispering their 
pain softly — only to themselves. 



ALPHONSE DAUDET 23 

But Daudet did not whisper; he spoke loudly, with 
animation, with a clear felicity of tone — as a bird sings. 
He saw life around him with extreme clearness, and he 
felt it as it is — thinner than air and more elusive than a 
flash of lightning. He hastened to offer it his com- 
passion, his indignation, his wonder, his sympathy, 
without giving a moment of thought to the momentous 
issues that are supposed to lurk in the logic of such 
sentiments. He tolerated the little foibles, the small 
ruffianisms, the grave mistakes; the only thing he 
distinctly would not forgive was hardness of heart. 
This unpractical attitude would have been fatal to 
a better man, but his readers have forgiven him. 
Withal he is chivalrous to exiled queens and deformed 
sempstresses, he is pityingly tender to broken-down 
actors, to ruined gentlemen, to stupid Academicians; 
he is glad of the joys of the commonplace people in a 
commonplace way — and he never makes a secret of all 
this. No, the man was not an artist. What if his 
creations are illumined by the sunshine of his tempera- 
ment so vividly that they stand before us infinitely more 
real than the dingy illusions surrounding our everyday 
existence.'^ The misguided man is for ever pottering 
amongst them, lifting up his voice, dotting his i's in the 
wrong places. He takes Tartarin by the arm, he does 
not conceal his interest in the Nabob's cheques, his 
sympathy for an honest Academician plus bete que 
nature, his hate for an architect plus mauvais que la 
gale; he is in the thick of it all. He feels with the 
Due de Mora and with Felicia Ruys — and he lets you 
see it. He does not sit on a pedestal in the hieratic 
and imbecile pose of some cheap god whose greatness 
consists in being too stupid to care. He cares im- 
mensely for his Nabobs, his kings, his book-keep)ers, his 
Colettes, and his Saphos. He vibrates together with 



24 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

his universe, and with lamentable simplicity follows M. 
de Montpavon on that last walk along the Boulevards. 
"Monsieur de Montpavon marche a la mort/' and the 
creator of that unlucky gentilhomme follows with 
stealthy footsteps, with wide eyes, with an impressively 
pointing finger. And who wouldn't look? But it is 
hard; it is sometimes very hard to forgive him the 
dotted i's, the pointing finger, this making plain of ob- 
vious mysteries. "Monsieur de Montpavon marche a 
la mort," and presently on the crowded pavement, 
takes off his hat with punctilious courtesy to the 
doctor's wife, who, elegant and unhappy, is bound 
on the same pilgrimage. This is too much! We 
feel we cannot forgive him such meetings, the con- 
stant whisper of his presence. We feel we cannot, 
till suddenly the very naivete of it all touches us with 
the revealed suggestion of a truth. Then we see that 
the man is not false; all this is done in transparent 
good faith. The man is not melodramatic; he is only 
picturesque. He may not be an artist, but he comes as 
near the truth as some of the greatest. His creations 
are seen; you can look into their very eyes, and these 
are as thoughtless as the eyes of any wise generation 
that has in its hands the fame of writers. Yes, they 
are seen, and the man who is not an artist is seen also, 
commiserating, indignant, joyous, human and alive in 
their very midst. Inevitably they marchent a la mort 
— and they are very near the truth of our common 
destiny: their fate is poignant, it is intensely interest- 
ing, and of not the slightest consequence. 



GUY DE MAUPASSANT^ 

1904 

To INTRODUCE Maupassant to English readers with 
apologetic explanations as though his art were recondite 
and the tendency of his work immoral would be a 
gratuitous imi>ertinence. 

Maupassant's conception of his art is such as one 
would expect from a practical and resolute mind ; but in 
the consummate simplicity of his technique it ceases to 
be perceptible. This is one of its greatest qualities, and 
like all the great virtues it is based primarily on self- 
denial. 

To pronounce a judgment upon the general tendency 
of an author is a difficult task. One could not depend 
upon reason alone, nor yet trust solely to one's emotions. 
Used together, they would in many cases traverse each 
other, because emotions have their own unanswerable 
logic. Our capacity for emotion is limited, and the 
field of our intelligence is restricted. Responsiveness 
to every feeling, combined with the p>enetration of 
every intellectual subterfuge, would end, not in judg- 
ment, but in universal absolution. Tout comprendre 
c'est tout pardonner. And in this benevolent neutrality 
\ towards the warring errors of human nature all light 
would go out from art and from life. 

We are at liberty then to quarrel with Maupassant's 
attitude towards our world in which, like the rest of us, 
he has that share which his senses are able to give him. 

^ " Yvette and Other Stories," Translated by Ada Galsworthy. 

i5 



26 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

But we need not quarrel with him violently. If our 
feelings (which are tender) happen to be hurt because 
his talent is not exercised for the praise and consolation 
of mankind, our intelligence (which is great) should let 
us see that he is a very splendid sinner, like all those 
who in this valley of compromises err by over-devotion M 
to the truth that is in them. His determinism, barren 
of praise, blame and consolation, has all the merit of his 
conscientious art. The worth of every conviction con- 
sists precisely in the steadfastness with which it is held. 

Except for his philosophy, which in the case of so 
consummate an artist does not matter (unless to the 
solemn and naive mind) Maupassant of all writers of 
fiction demands least forgiveness from his readers. He 
does not require forgiveness because he is never dull. 

The interest of a reader in a work of imagination is 
either ethical or that of simple curiosity. Both are 
I>erfectly legitimate, since there is both a moral and an 
excitement to be found in a faithful rendering of life. 
And in Maupassant's work there is the interest of 
curiosity and the moral of a point of view consistently 
preserved and never obtruded for the end of personal 
gratification. The spectacle of this immense talent 
served by exceptional faculties and triumphing over the 
most thankless subjects by an unswerving singleness of 
purpose is in itself an admirable lesson in the power of 
artistic honesty, one may say of artistic virtue. The 
inherent greatness of the man consists in this, that he 
will let none of the fascinations that beset a writer 
working in loneliness turn him away from the straight 
path, from the vouchsafed vision of excellence. He will 
not be led into perdition by the seductions of sentiment, 
of eloquence, of humour, of pathos; of all that splendid 
pageant of faults that pass between the writer and his 
probity on the blank sheet of paper, like the glittering 



GUY DE MAUPASSANT 27 

cortege of deadly sins before the austere anchorite in 
the desert air of Thebaide. This is not to say that 
Maupassant's austerity has never faltered; but the fact 
remains that no tempting demon has ever succeeded in 
hurling him down from his high, if narrow, pedestal. 
It is the austerity of his talent, of course, that is in 
question. Let the discriminating reader, who at times 
may well spare a moment or two to the consideration 
and enjoyment of artistic excellence, be asked to re- 
jflect a httle upon the texture of two stories included in 
this volume: "A Piece of String," and "A Sale." 
How many openings the last offers for the gratuitous 
display of the author's wit or clever buffoonery, the 
first for an unmeasured display of sentiment! And 
both sentiment and buffoonery could have been made 
very good too, in a way accessible to the meanest in- 
telligence, at the cost of truth and honesty. Here it is 
where Maupassant's austerity comes in. He refrains 
from setting his cleverness against the eloquence of the 
facts. There is humour and pathos in these stories; but 
such is the greatness of his talent, the refinement of his 
artistic conscience, that all his high qualities appear 
inherent in the very things of which he speaks, as if they 
had been altogether independent of his presentation. 
Facts, and again facts are his unique concern. That is 
why he is not always properly understood. His facts 
are so perfectly rendered that, like the actualities of life 
itself, they demand from the reader the faculty of 
observation which is rare, the power of appreciation 
which is generally wanting in most of us who are guided 
mainly by empty phrases requiring no effort, demanding 
from us no qualities except a vague susceptibility to 
emotion. Nobody has ever gained the vast applause 
of a crowd by the simple and clear exposition of vital 
facts. Words alone strung upon a convention have 



28 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

fascinated us as worthless glass beads strung on a thread 
have charmed at all times our brothers the unsophisti- 
cated savages of the islands. Now, Maupassant, of 
whom it has been said that he is the master of the mot 
juste, has never been a dealer in words. His wares 
have been, not glass beads, but polished gems: not the 
most rare and precious, perhaps, but of the very first 
water of their kind. 

That he took trouble with his gems, taking them up 
in the rough and polishing each facet patiently, the 
publication of the two posthumous volumes of short 
stories proves abundantly. I think it proves also the 
assertion made here that he was by no means a dealer 
in words. On looking at the first feeble drafts from 
which so many perfect stories have been fashioned, 
one discovers that what has been matured, improved, 
brought to perfection by unwearied endeavour is not 
the diction of the tale, but the vision of its true shape 
and detail. Those first attempts are not faltering or I 
uncertain in expression. It is the conception which is ; 
at fault. The subjects have not yet been adequately 
seen. His proceeding was not to group expressive 
words, that mean nothing, around misty and mysterious 
shapes dear to muddled intellects and belonging neither 
to earth nor to heaven. His vision by a more scrupu- 
lous, prolonged and devoted attention to the aspects of 
the visible world discovered at last the right words as if 
miraculously impressed for him upon the face of things 
and events. This was the particular shape taken by 
his inspiration; it came to him directly, honestly in the 
light of his day, not on the tortuous, dark roads of 
meditation. His realities came to him from a genuine 
source, from this universe of vain appearances wherein 
we men have found everything to make us proud, sorry, 
exalted, and humble. 






GUY DE MAUPASSANT 29 

Maupassant's renown is universal, but his popularity 
is restricted. It is not difficult to perceive why. 
Maupassant is an intensely national writer. He is so 
intensely national in his logic, in his clearness, in his 
aesthetic and moral conceptions, that he has been ac- 
cepted by his countrymen without having had to pay 
the tribute of flattery either to the nation as a whole, or 
to any class, sphere or division of the nation. The 
truth of his art tells with an irresistible force; and he 
stands excused from the duty of patriotic posturing. 
He is a Frenchman of Frenchmen beyond question or 
cavil, and with that he is simple enough to be universally 
comprehensible. What is wanting to his universal 
success is the mediocrity of an obvious and appealing 
tenderness. He neglects to qualify his truth with the 
drop of facile sweetness; he forgets to strew paper roses 
over the tombs. The disregard of these common 
decencies lays him open to the charges of cruelty, 
cynicism, hardness. And yet it can be safely affirmed 
that this man wrote from the fulness of a compassionate 
heart. He is merciless and yet gentle with his mankind; 
he does not rail at their prudent fears and their small 
artifices; he does not despise their labours. It seems 
to me that he looks with an eye of profound pity upon 
their troubles, deceptions and misery. But he looks 
at them all. He sees — and does not turn away his head. 
As a matter of fact he is courageous. 

Courage and justice are not popular virtues. The 
practice of strict justice is shocking to the multitude 
who always (perhaps from an obscure sense of guilt) 
attach to it the meanmg of mercy. In the majority of 
us, who want to be left alone with our illusions, courage 
inspires a vague alarm. This is what is felt about 
Maupassant. His qualities, to use the charming and 
popular phrase, are not lovable. Courage being a 



30 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

force will not masquerade in the robes of affected 
delicacy and restraint. But if his courage is not of a 
chivalrous stamp, it cannot be denied that it is never 
brutal for the sake of effect. The writer of these few 
reflections, inspired by a long and intimate acquaintance 
with the work of the man, has been struck by the ap- 
preciation of Maupassant manifested by many women 
gifted with tenderness and intelligence. Their more 
delicate and audacious souls are good judges of courage. 
Their finer penetration has discovered his genuine 
masculinity without display, his virility without a pose. 
They have discerned in his faithful dealings with the 
world that enterprising and fearless temperament, poor 
in ideas but rich in power, which appeals most to the 
feminine mind. 

It cannot be denied that he thinks very little. In 
him extreme energy of perception achieves great re- 1 
suits, as in men of action the energy of force and desire, f 
His view of intellectual problems is perhaps more 
simple than their nature warrants; still a man who has 
written " Yvette" cannot be accused of want of subtlety. 
But one cannot insist enough upon this, that his subtlety, 
his humour, his grimness, though no doubt they are 
his own, are never presented otherwise but as belonging 
to our life, as found in nature, whose beauties and cruel- 
ties alike breathe the spirit of serene unconsciousness. 

Maupassant's philosophy of life is more tempera- 
mental than rational. He expects nothing from gods 
or men. He trusts his senses for information and 
his instinct for deductions. It may seem that he has 
made but little use of his mind. But let me be clearly 
understood. His sensibility is really very great; and it 
is impossible to be sensible, unless one thinks vividly,* 
unless one thinks correctly, starting from intelligible 
premises to an unsophisticated conclusion. 



GUY DE MAUPASSANT 31 

This is literary honesty. It may be remarked that 
it does not differ very greatly from the ideal honesty 
of the respectable majority, from the honesty of law- 
givers, of warriors, of kings, of bricklayers, of all those 
who express their fundamental sentiment in the ordi- 
nary course of their activities, by the work of their 
hands. 

The work of Maupassant's hands is honest. He 
thinks sufficiently to concrete his fearless conclusions 
in illuminative instances. He renders them with that 
exact knowledge of the means and that absolute de- 
votion to the aim of creating a true effect — which is art. 
He is the most accomplished of narrators. 

It is evident that Maupassant looked upon his man- 
kind in another spirit than those writers who make haste 
to submerge the difficulties of our holding-place in the 
universe under a flood of false and sentimental assump- 
tions. Maupassant was a true and dutiful lover of our 
earth. He says himself in one of his descriptive pas- 
sages: '^Nous autres que seduit la terre . . ." It 
was true. The earth had for him a compelling charm. 
He looks upon her august and furrowed face with the 
fierce insight of real passion. His is the power of de- 
tecting the one immutable quality that matters in 
the changing aspects of nature and under the ever- 
shifting surface of life. To say that he could not em- 
brace in his glance all its magnificence and all its misery 
is only to say that he was human. He lays claim to 
nothing that his matchless vision has not made his own. 
This creative artist has the true imagination; he never 
condescends to invent anything; he sets up no empty 
pretences. And he stoops to no littleness in his art — 
least of all to the miserable vanity of a catching phrase. 



ANATOLE FRANCE 

1904 



"Crainquebille 



>> 



The latest volume of M. Anatole France purports, 
by the declaration of its title-page, to contain several 
profitable narratives. The story of Crainquebille's 
encounter with human justice stands at the head of 
them; a tale of a well-bestowed charity closes the book 
with the touch of playful irony characteristic of the 
writer on whom the most distinguished amongst his 
literary countrymen have conferred the rank of Prince 
of Prose. I 

Never has a dignity been better borne. M. Anatole 



France is a good prince. He knows nothing of tyranny 
but much of compassion. The detachment of his mind 
from common errors and current superstitions befits 
the exalted rank he holds in the Commonwealth of 
Literature. It is just to suppose that the clamour of 
the tribes in the forum had little to do with his eleva- 
tion. Their elect are of another stamp. They are 
such as their need of precipitate action requires. He 
is the Elect of the Senate — the Senate of Letters — 
whose Conscript Fathers have recognised him as 
primus inter pares; a post of pure honour and of no 
privilege. 

It is a good choice. First, because it is just, and next, 

32 



i 



ANATOLE FRANCE 33 

because it is safe. The dignity will suffer no diminu- 
tion in M. Anatole France's hands. He is worthy of a 
great tradition, learned in the lessons of the past, con- 
cerned with the present, and as earnest as to the future 
as a good prince should be in his public action. It is 
a Republican dignity. And M. Anatole France, with 
his sceptical insight into all forms of government, is a 
good Republican. He is indulgent to the weaknesses of 
the people, and perceives that political institutions, 
whether contrived by the wisdom of the few or the 
ignorance of the many, are incapable of securing the 
happiness of mankind. He perceives this truth in the 
serenity of his soul and in the elevation of his mind. 
He expresses his convictions with measure, restraint 
and harmony, which are indeed princely qualities. He 
is a great analyst of illusions. He searches and probes 
their innermost recesses as if they were realities made 
of an eternal substance. And therein consists his 
humanity; this is the expression of his profound and 
unalterable compassion. He will flatter no tribe, no 
section in the forum or in the market-place. His lucid 
thought is not beguiled into false pity or into the 
common weakness of affection. He feels that men bom 
in ignorance as in the house of an enemy, and con- 
demned to struggle with error and passions through 
endless centuries, should be spared the supreme cruelty 
of a hope for ever deferred. He knows that our best 
hopes are irrealisable; that it is the almost incredible 
misfortune of mankind, but also its highest privilege, 
to aspire towards the impossible; that men have never 
failed to defeat their highest aims by the very strength 
of their humanity which can conceive the most gigantic 
tasks but leaves them disarmed before their irremedi- 
able littleness. He knows this well because he is an artist 
and a master; but he knows, too, that only in the con- 



34 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

tinuity of effort there is a refuge from despair for minds 
less clear-seeing and philosophic than his own. There- 
fore he wishes us to believe and to hope, preserving in 
our activity the consoling illusion of power and in- 
telligent purpose. He is a good and politic prince. 

"The majesty of Justice is contained entire in each 
sentence pronounced by the judge in the name of the 
sovereign people. Jerome Grain quebille, hawker of 
vegetables, became aware of the august aspect of the 
law as he stood indicted before the tribunal of the 
higher Police Court on a charge of insulting a constable 
of the force." With this exposition begins the first 
tale of M. Anatole France's latest volume. 

The bust of the Republic and the image of the 
Crucified Christ appear side by side above the bench f 
occupied by the President Bourriche and his two 
Assessors; all the laws divine and human are sus- 
pended over the head of Crainquebille. 

From the first visual impression of the accused and of 
the court the author passes by a characteristic and 
natural turn to the historical and moral significance of 
those two emblems of State and Religion whose accord 
is only possible to the confused reasoning of an average 
man. But the reasoning of M. Anatole France is never 
confused. His reasoning is clear and informed by a 
profound erudition. Such is not the case of Crainque- 
bille, a street -hawker, charged with insulting the con- 
stituted power of society in the person of a police- 
man. The charge is not true, nothing was further from 
his thoughts; but, amazed by the novelty of his position, 
he does not reflect that the Cross on the wall perpetuates 
the memory of a sentence which for nineteen hundred 
years all the Christian peoples have looked upon as 
a grave miscarriage of justice. He might well have 
challenged the President to pronounce any sort of 



ANATOLE FRANCE 35 

sentence, if it were merely to forty-eight hours of simple 
imprisonment, in the name of the Crucified Redeemer. 

He might have done so. But Crainquebille, who has 
lived pushing every day for half a century his hand- 
barrow loaded with vegetables through the streets 
of Paris, has not a philosophic mind. Truth to say he 
has nothing. He is one of the disinherited. Properly 
speaking, he has no existence at all, or, to be strictly 
truthful, he had no existence till M. Anatole France's 
philosophic mind and human sympathy have called him 
up from his nothingness for our pleasure, and, as the 
title-page of the book has it, no doubt for our profit also. 

Therefore we behold him in the dock, a stranger to all 
historical, political or social considerations which can 
be brought to bear upon his case. He remains lost in 
astonishment. Penetrated with respect, overwhelmed 
with awe, he is ready to trust the judge upon the 
question of his transgression. In his conscience he 
does not think himself culpable; but M. Anatole 
France's philosophical mind discovers for us that he 
feels all the insignificance of such a thing as the con- 
science of a mere street-hawker in the face of the sym- 
bols of the law and before the ministers of social re- 
pression. Crainquebille is innocent; but already the 
young advocate, his defender, has half persuaded him 
of his guilt. 

On this phrase practically ends the introductory 
chapter of the story which, as the author's dedication 
states, has inspired an admirable draughtsman and a 
skilful dramatist, each in his art, to a vision of tragic 
grandeur. And this opening chapter without a name — 
consisting of two and a half pages, some four hundred 
words at most — is a masterpiece of insight and sim- 
plicity, resumed in M. Anatole France's distinction 
of thought and in his princely command of words. 



36 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

It is followed by six more short chapters, concise 
and full, delicate and complete like the petals of a 
flower, presenting to us the Adventure of Crainquebille 
— Crainquebille before the Justice — ^An Apology for 
the President of the Tribunal — Of the Submission of 
Crainquebille to the Laws of the Republic — Of his 
Attitude before the Public Opinion, and so on to the 
chapter of the Last Consequences. We see, created 
for us in his outward form and innermost perplexity, 
the old man degraded from his high estate of a law- 
abiding street-hawker and driven to insult, really this 
time, the majesty of the social order in the person of 
another police-constable. It is not an act of revolt, 
and still less of revenge. Crainquebille is too old, too 
resigned, too weary, too guileless to raise the black 
standard of insurrection. He is cold and homeless and 
starving. He remembers the warmth and the food of 
the prison. He perceives the means to get back there. 
Since he has been locked up, he argues with himself, 
for uttering words which, as a matter of fact he did not 
say, he will go forth now, and to the first policeman he 
meets will say those very words in order to be im- 
prisoned again. Thus reasons Crainquebille with 
simplicity and confidence. He accepts facts. Noth- 
ing surprises him. But all the phenomena of social 
organisation and of his own life remain for him myster- 
ious to the end. The description of the policeman in 
his short cape and hood, who stands quite still, under 
the light of a street lamp at the edge of the pavement 
shining with the wet of a rainy autumn evening along 
the whole extent of a long and deserted thoroughfare, 
is a j)erfect piece of imaginative precision. From 
under the edge of the hood his eyes look upon Crain-' 
quebille, who has just uttered in an uncertain voice 
the sacramental, insulting phrase of the popular slang — 



ANATOLE FRANCE 37 

Mort aux vaches! They look upon him shining in the 
deep shadow of the hood with an expression of sadness, 
vigilance, and contempt. 

He does not move. Crainquebille, in a feeble and 
hesitating voice, repeats once more the insulting words. 
But this policeman is full of philosophic superiority, 
disdain, and indulgence. He refuses to take in charge 
the old and miserable vagabond who stands before him 
shivering and ragged in the drizzle. And the ruined 
Crainquebille, victim of a ridiculous miscarriage of 
justice, appalled at this magnanimity, passes on hope- 
lessly down the street full of shadows where the lamps 
gleam each in a ruddy halo of falling mist. 

M. Anatole France can speak for the pyeople. This 
prince of the Senate is invested with the tribunitian 
power. M. Anatole France is something of a Socialist; 
and in that respect he seems to depart from his sceptical 
philosophy. But as an illustrious statesman, now no 
more, a great prince too, with an ironic mind and a 
literary gift, has sarcastically remarked in one of his 
public speeches: "We are all Socialists now." And 
in the sense in which it may be said that we all in 
Europe are Christians that is true enough. To many 
of us Socialism is merely an emotion. An emotion 
is much and is also less than nothing. It is the initial 
impulse. The real Socialism of to-day is a religion. 
It has its dogmas. The value of the dogma does not 
consist in its truthfulness, and M. Anatole France, 
who loves truth, does not love dogma. Only, unlike 
religion, the cohesive strength of Socialism lies not in 
its dogmas but in its ideal. It is perhaps a too 
materialistic ideal, and the mind of M. Anatole France 
may not find in it either comfort or consolation. It is 
not to be doubted that he suspects this himself; but 
there is something reposeful in the finality of popular 



S8 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

conceptions. M. Anatole France, a good prince and a 
good Republican, will succeed no doubt in being a 
good Socialist. He will disregard the stupidity of the 
dogma and the unlovely form of the ideal. His art 
will find its own beauty in the imaginative presenta- 
tion of wrongs, of errors, and miseries that call aloud 
for redress. M. Anatole France is humane. He is 
also human. He may be able to discard his philosophy ; 
to forget that the evils are many and the remedies are 
few, that there is no universal panacea, that fatality 
is invincible, that there is an implacable menace of 
death in the triumph of the humanitarian idea. He 
may forget all that because love is stronger than truth. 
Besides Crainquebille this volume contains sixteen 
other stories and sketches. To define them it is enough 
to say that they are written in M. Anatole France's 
prose. One sketch entitled "Riquet" may be found 
incorporated in the volume of "Monsieur Bergeret a 
Paris." "Putois" is a remarkable little tale, significant, 
humorous, amusing, and symbolic. It concerns the 
career of a man bom in the utterance of a hasty and 
untruthful excuse made by a lady at a loss how to de-| 
cline without offence a very pressing invitation to 
dinner from a very tyrannical aunt. This happens in a 
provincial town, and the lady says in effect "Impossible, \ 
my dear aunt. To-morrow I am expecting the gar- 
dener." And the garden she glances at is a poor 
garden; it is a wild garden; its extent is insignificant and 
its neglect seems beyond remedy. "A gardener!' 
What ioY?" asks the aunt. "To work in the garden." ' 
And the poor lady is abashed at the transparence of her 
evasion. But the lie is told, it is believed, and she 
sticks to it. When the masterful old aunt inquires, 
"What is the man's name, my dear.^^" she answers 
brazenly, "His name is Putois." "Where does he 



ANATOLE FRANCE 39 

live?" "Oh, I don't know; anywhere. He won't 
give his address. One leaves a message for him here 
and there." "Oh! I see," says the other; "he is a sort 
of ne'er do well, an idler, a vagabond. I advise you, 
my dear, to be careful how you let such a creature into 
your grounds; but I have a large garden, and when 
you do not want his services I shall find him some work 
to do, and see he does it too. Tell your Putois to come 
and see me." And thereupon Putois is born; he stalks 
abroad, invisible, upon his career of vagabondage and 
crime, -Stealing melons from gardens and teaspoons from 
pantries, indulging his licentious proclivities; becoming 
the talk of the town and of the countryside; seen 
simultaneously in far-distant places; pursued by 
gendarmes, whose brigadier assures the uneasy house- 
holders that he "knows that scamp very well, and 
won't be long in laying his hands upon him." A 
detailed description of his person collected from the 
information furnished by various people appears in the 
columns of a local newspaper. Putois lives in his 
strength and malevolence. He lives after the manner 
of legendary heroes, of the gods of Olympus. He is the 
creation of the popular mind. There comes a time 
when even the innocent originator of that mysterious 
and potent evil-doer is induced to believe for a moment 
that he may have a real and tangible presence. All this 
is told with the wit and the art and the philosophy 
which is familiar to M. Anatole France's readers and 
admirers. For it is difficult to read M. Anatole France 
without admiring him. He has the princely gift of 
arousing a spontaneous loyalty, but with this difference, 
that the consent of our reason has its place by the side 
of our enthusiasm. He is an artist. As an artist he 
awakens emotion. The quality of his art remains, as 
an inspiration, fascinating and inscrutable; but the 



40 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

proceedings of his thought compel our intellectual ad- 
miration. 

In this volume the trifle called "The Military 
Manoeuvres at Montil," apart from its far-reaching 
irony, embodies incidentally the very spirit of auto- 
mobilism. Somehow or other, how you cannot tell, 
the flight over the country in a motor-car, its sensations, 
its fatigue, its vast topographical range, its incidents 
down to the bursting of a tyre, are brought home to you 
with all the force of high imaginative perception. It 
would be out of place to analyse here the means by 
which the true impression is conveyed so that the 
absurd rushing about of General Decuir, in a 30-horse- 
power car, in search of his cavalry brigade, becomes to 
you a more real experience than any day-and-night run 
you may ever have taken yourself. SuflSce it to say 
that M. Anatole France had thought the thing worth 
doing and that it becomes, in virtue of his art, a distinct 
achievement. And there are other sketches in this 
book, more or less slight, but all worthy of regard — the 
childhood's recollections of Professor Bergeret and his 
sister Zoe; the dialogue of the two upright judges and 
the conversation of their horses; the dream of M. Jean 
Marteau, aimless, extravagant, apocalyptic, and of 
all the dreams one ever dreamt, the most essentially 
dreamlike. The vision of M. Anatole France, the 
Prince of Prose, ranges over all the extent of his realm, 
indulgent and penetrating, disillusioned and curious, 
finding treasures of truth and beauty concealed from 
less gifted magicians. Contemplating the exactness of 
his images and the justice of his judgment, the freedom 
of his fancy and the fidelity of his purpose, one becomes 
aware of the futility of literary watch-words and 
the vanity of all the schools of fiction. Not that M. 
Anatole France is a wild and untrammelled genius. He 



ANATOLE FRANCE 41 

is not that. Issued legitimately from the past, he is 
mindful of his high descent. He has a critical tempera- 
ment joined to creative power. He surveys his vast 
domain in a spirit of princely moderation that knows 
nothing of excesses but much of restraint. 

II 

"L'lLE DES PiNGOUINs" 

M.-Anatole France, historian and adventurer, has 
given us many profitable histories of saints and sinners, 
of Roman procurators and of officials of the Third 
Republic, of grandes dames and of dames not so very 
grand, of ornate Latinists and of inarticulate street- 
hawkers, of priests and generals — in fact, the history 
of all humanity as it appears to his penetrating eye, 
serving a mind marvellously incisive in its scepticism, 
and a heart that, of all contemporary hearts gifted with 
a voice, contains the greatest treasure of charitable 
irony. As to M. Anatole France's adventures, these 
are well-known. They lie open to this prodigal world in 
the four volumes of the Vie Litteraire, describing the ad- 
ventures of a choice soul amongst masterpieces. For 
such is the romantic view M. Anatole France takes 
of the life of a literary critic. History and adventure, 
then, seem to be the chosen fields for the magnificent 
evolutions of M. Anatole France's prose; but no ma- 
terial limits can stand in the way of a genius. The 
latest book from his pen — which may be called golden, 
as the lips of an eloquent saint once upon a time were 
acclaimed golden by the faithful — this latest book is, up 
to a certain point, a book of travel. 

I would not mislead a public whose confidence I 
court. The book is not a record of globe-trotting. I 



42 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

regret it. It would have been a joy to watch M. 
Anatole France pouring the clear elixir compounded 
of his Pyrrhonic philosophy, his Benedictine erudition, 
his gentle wit and most humane irony into such an 
unpromising and opaque vessel. He would have 
attempted it in a spirit of benevolence towards his 
fellow men and of compassion for that life of the earth 
which is but a vain and transitory illusion. M. Anatole 
France is a great magician, yet there seem to be tasks 
which he dare not face. For he is also a sage. 

It is a book of ocean travel — ^not, however, as under- 
stood by Herr Ballin of Hamburg, the Machiavel of the 
Atlantic. It is a book of exploration and discovery — 
not, however, as conceived by an enterprising journal 
and a shrewdly philanthropic king of the nineteenth 
century. It is nothing so recent as that. It dates much 
further back; long, long before the dark age when 
Krupp of Essen wrought at his steel plates and a Ger- 
man Emperor condescendingly suggested the last im- 
provements in ships' dining-tables. The best idea of 
the inconceivable antiquity of that enterprise I can give 
you is by stating the nature of the explorer's ship. It 
was a trough of stone, a vessel of hollowed granite. 

The explorer was St. Mael, a saint of Armorica. I 
had never heard of him before, but I believe now in his 
arduous existence with a faith which is a tribute to M.i 
Anatole France's pious earnestness and delicate irony. 
St. Mael existed. It is distinctly stated of him that his 
life was a progress in virtue. Thus it seems that there 
may be saints that are not progressively virtuous. St. 
Mael was not of that kind. He was industrious. He 
evangelised the heathen. He erected two hundred and 
eighteen chapels and seventy-four abbeys. Indefati- 
gable navigator of the faith, he drifted casually in the 
miraculous trough of stone from coast to coast and 



ANATOLE FRANCE 43 

from island to island along the northern seas. At the 
age of eighty-four his high stature was bowed by his 
long labours, but his sinewy arms preserved their 
vigour and his rude eloquence had lost nothing of its 
force. 

A nautical devil tempting him by the worldly sug- 
gestion of fitting out his desultory, miraculous trough 
with mast, sail, and rudder for swifter progression (the 
idea of haste has sprung from the pride of Satan), the 
simple old saint lent his ear to the subtle arguments of 
the progressive enemy of mankind. 

The venerable St. Mael fell away from grace by not 
perceiving at once that a gift of heaven cannot be im- 
proved by the contrivances of human ingenuity. His 
punishment was adequate. A terrific tempest snatched 
the rigged ship of stone in its whirlwinds, and, to be 
brief, the dazed St. Mael was stranded violently on the 
Island of Penguins. 

The saint wandered away from the shore. It was a 
flat, round island whence rose in the centre a conical 
mountain capped with clouds. The rain was falling 
incessantly — a gentle, soft rain which caused the 
simple saint to exclaim in great delight: "This is the 
island of tears, the island of contrition!" 

Meantime the inhabitants had flocked in their tens 
of thousands to an amphitheatre of rocks; they were 
penguins; but the holy man, rendered deaf and purblind 
by his years, mistook excusably the multitude of silly, 
erect, and self-important birds for a human crowd. At 
once he began to preach to them the doctrine of sal- 
vation. Having finished his discourse he lost no time 
in administering to his interesting congregation the 
sacrament of baptism. 

If you are at all a theologian you will see that it 
was no mean adventure to happen to a well-meaning 



44 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

and zealous saint. Pray reflect on the magnitude of the 
issues! It is easy to believe what M. Anatole France 
says, that, when the baptism of the Penguins became 
known in Paradise, it caused there neither joy nor 
sorrow, but a profound sensation. 

M. Anatole France is no mean theologian himself. 
He reports with great casuistical erudition the debates 
in the saintly council assembled in Heaven for the 
consideration of an event so disturbing to the economy 
of religious mysteries. Ultimately the baptized Pen- 
guins had to be turned into human beings; and to- 
gether with the privilege of sublime hopes these inno- 
cent birds received the curse of original sin, with the 
labours, the miseries, the passions, and the weaknesses 
attached to the fallen condition of humanity. 

At this point M. Anatole France is again a historian. 
From being the Hakluyt of a saintly adventurer he 
turns (but more concisely) into the Gibbon of Imperial 
Penguins. Tracing the development of their civili- 
zation, the absurdity of their desires, the pathos of their 
folly and the ridiculous littleness of their quarrels, his 
golden pen lightens by relevant but unpuritanical 
anecdotes the austerity of a work devoted to a subject 
so grave as the Polity of Penguins. It is a very admir- 
able treatment, and I hasten to congratulate all men 
of receptive mind on the feast of wisdom which is theirs 
for the mere plucking of a book from a shelf. 



TURGENEV^ 

1917 

Dear Edward: 

I am glad to hear that you are about to pubHsh a 
study of Turgenev, that fortunate artist who has found 
so much in Hfe for us and no doubt for himself, with the 
exception of bare justice. Perhaps that will come to 
him, too, in time. Your study may help the consum- 
mation. For his luck persists after his death. What 
greater luck an artist like Turgenev could wish for than 
to find in the English-speaking world a translator who 
has missed none of the most delicate, most simple 
beauties of his work, and a critic who has known how 
to analyse and point out its high qualities with perfect 
sympathy and insight. 

After twenty odd years of friendship (and my first 
Hterary friendship too) I may well permit myself to 
make that statement, while thinking of your wonderful 
Prefaces as they appeared from time to time in the 
volumes of Turgenev's complete edition, the last of 
which came into the light of public indifference in the 
ninety-ninth year of the nineteenth century. 

With that year one may say, with some justice, that 
the age of Turgenev had come to an end too ; yet work 
so simple and human, so independent of the transitory 
formulas and theories of art, belongs as you point out in 
the Preface to "Smoke" "to all time. " 

Turgenev's creative activity covers about thirty 

1 "Turgenev: A Study." By Edward Garnett. 

45 



46 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

years. Since it came to an end the social and political . 
events in Russia have moved at an accelerated pace, ! 
but the deep origins of them, in the moral and intellec- 
tual unrest of the souls, are recorded in the whole body 
of his work with the unerring lucidity of a great national 
writer. The first stirrings, the first gleams of the great i| 
forces can be seen almost in every page of the novels, of 
the short stories and of "A Sportsman's Sketches" — 
those marvellous landscapes peopled by unforgettable j 
figures. 

Those will never grow old. Fashions in monsters do 
change, but the truth of humanity goes on for ever, 
unchangeable and inexhaustible in the variety of its 
disclosures. Whether Turgenev's art, which has cap- 
tured it with such mastery and such gentleness, is for 
"all time" it is hard to say. Since, as you say yourself, 
he brings all his problems and characters to the test of 
love we may hope that it will endure at least till the 
infinite emotions of love are replaced by the exact 
simplicity of perfected Eugenics. But even by then, I 
think, women would not have changed much; and the 
women of Turgenev who understood them so tenderly, 
so reverently and so passionately — they, at least, are 
certainly for all time. 

Women are, one may say, the foundation of his art. 
They are Russian of course. Never was a writer so 
profoundly, so whole-souledly national. But for non- 
Russian readers, Turgenev's Russia is but a canvas on 
which the incomparable artist of humanity lays his 
colours and his forms in the great light and the free air 
of the world. Had he invented them all and also every 
stick and stone, brook and hill and field in which they 
move, his personages would have been just as true and 
as poignant in their perplexed lives. They are his own 
and also universal. Any one can accept them with 



TURGENEV 47 

no more question than one accepts the Itahans of 
Shakespeare. 

In the larger, non-Russian view, what should make 
Turgenev sympathetic and welcome to the English- 
speaking world, is his essential humanity. All his 
creations, fortunate and unfortunate, oppressed and op- 
pressors are human beings, not strange beasts in a men- 
agerie or damned souls knocking themselves to pieces 
in the stuffy darkness of mystical contradictions. They 
are human beings, fit to live, fit to suffer, fit to struggle, 
fit to win, fit to lose, in the endless and inspiring 
game of pursuing from day to day the ever-receding 
future. 

I began by calling him lucky, and he was, in a sense. 
But one ends by having some doubts. To be so great 
without the slightest parade and so fine without any 
tricks of "cleverness" must be fatal to any man's 
influence with his contemporaries. 

Frankly, I don't want to appear as qualified to judge 
of things Russian. It wouldn't be true. I know noth- 
ing of them. But I am aware of a few general truths, 
such as, for instance, that no man, whatever may be the 
loftiness of his character, the purity of his motives and 
the peace of his conscience — no man, I say, likes to be 
beaten with sticks during the greater part of his exist- 
ence. From what one knows of his history it appears 
clearly that in Russia almost any stick was good enough 
to beat Turgenev with m his latter years. When he 
died the characteristically chicken-hearted Autocracy 
hastened to stuff his mortal envelope into the tomb 
it refused to honour, while the sensitive Revolutionists 
went on for a time flinging after his shade those jeers 
and curses from which that impartial lover of all his 
countrymen had suffered so much in his lifetime. For 
he, too, was sensitive. Every page of his writing bears 



48 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

its testimony to the fatal absence of callousness in the 
man. 

And now he suffers a little from other things. In 
truth it is not the convulsed terror-haunted Dostoevski 
but the serene Turgenev who is under a curse. For only 
think! Every gift has been heaped on his cradle: 
absolute sanity and the deepest sensibility, the clearest 
vision and the quickest responsiveness, penetrating in- 
sight and unfailing generosity of judgment, an exquisite 
perception of the visible world and an unerring instinct 
for the significant, for the essential in the life of men 
and women, the clearest mind, the warmest heart, the 
largest sympathy — and all that in perfect measure. 
There's enough there to ruin the prospects of any 
writer. For you know very well, my dear Edward, that 
if you had Antinous himself in a booth of the world's 
fair, and killed yourself in protesting that his soul was 
as perfect as his body, you wouldn't get one per cent of 
the crowd struggling next door for a sight of the Double- 
headed Nightingale or of some weak-kneed giant grin- 
ning through a horse collar. 



STEPHEN CRANE 

A Note Without Dates 
1919 

My acquaintance with Stephen Crane was brought 
about by Mr. Pawling, partner in the pubHshing firm of 
Mr. William Heinemann. 

One day Mr. Pawling said to me: "Stephen Crane 
has arrived in England. I asked him if there was any- 
body he wanted to meet and he mentioned two names. 
One of them was yours." I had then just been reading, 
like the rest of the world. Crane's "Red Badge of 
Courage." The subject of that story was war, from 
the point of view of an individual soldier's emotions. 
That individual (he remains nameless throughout) was 
interesting enough in himself, but on turning over the 
pages of that little book which had for the moment 
secured such a noisy recognition I had been even more 
interested in the personality of the writer. The picture 
of a simple and untried youth becoming through the 
needs of his country part of a great fighting machine 
was presented with an earnestness of purpose, a sense of 
tragic issues, and an imaginative force of expression 
which struck me as quite uncommon and altogether 
worthy of admiration. 

Apparently Stephen Crane had received a favourable 
impression from the reading of the "Nigger of the Nar- 
cissus/' a book of mine which had also been published 
lately. I was truly pleased to hear this. 

49 



50 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

On my next visit to town we met at a lunch. I saw a 
yomig man of medium stature and slender build, with 
very steady, penetrating blue eyes, the eyes of a being 
who not only sees visions but can brood over them to 
some purpose. 

He had indeed a wonderful power of vision, which he 
applied to the things of this earth and of our mortal 
humanity with a penetrating force that seemed to reach, 
within life's appearances and forms, the very spirit of 
life's truth. His ignorance of the world at large — he had 
seen very little of it — did not stand in the way of his 
imaginative grasp of facts, events, and picturesque 
men. 

His manner was very quiet, his personality at first 
sight interesting, and he talked slowly with an into- 
nation which on some people, mainly Americans, had, 
I believe, a jarring effect. But not on me. Whatever 
he said had a personal note, and he expressed himself 
with a graphic simplicity which was extremely engag- 
ing. He knew little of literature, either of his own 
country or of any other, but he was himself a wonderful 
artist in words whenever he took a pen into his hand. 
Then his gift came out — and it was seen then to be much 
more than mere felicity of language. His impression- 
ism of phrase went really deeper than the surface. In 
his writing he was very sure of his effects. I don't 
think he was ever in doubt about what he could do. 
Yet it often seemed to me that he was but half aware 
of the exceptional quality of his achievement. 

This achievement was curtailed by his early death. 
It was a great loss to his friends, but perhaps not so 
much to literature. I think that he had given his 
measure fully in the few books he had the time to write. 
Let me not be misunderstood : the loss was great, but 
it was the loss of the delight his art could give, not the 



STEPHEN CRANE 51 

loss of any further possible revelation. As to himself, 
who can say how much he gained or lost by quitting 
so early this world of the living, which he knew how to 
set before us in the terms of his own artistic vision? 
Perhaps he did not lose a great deal. The recognition 
he was accorded was rather languid and given him 
grudgingly. The worthiest welcome he secured for 
his tales in this country was from Mr. W. Henley in the 
New Review and later, towards the end of his life, from 
the late Mr. William Blackwood in his magazine. For 
the rest I must say that during his sojourn in England 
he had the misfortune to be, as the French say, mal 
entoure. He was beset by people who understood not 
the quality of his genius and were antagonistic to the 
deeper fineness of his nature. Some of them have died 
since, but dead or alive they are not worth speaking 
about now. I don't think he had any illusions about 
them himself: yet there was a strain of good-nature 
and perhaps of weakness in his character which pre- 
vented him from shaking himself free from their worth- 
less and patronizing attentions, which in those days 
caused me much secret irritation whenever I stayed 
with him in either of his English homes. My wife and 
I like best to remember him riding to meet us at the 
gate of the Park at Brede. Born master of his sincere 
impressions, he was also a born horseman. He never 
appeared so happy or so much to advantage as on the 
back of a horse. He had formed the project of teach- 
ing my eldest boy to ride and meantime, when the 
child was about two years old, presented him with his 
first dog. 

I saw Stephen Crane a few days after his arrival in 
London. I saw him for the last time on his last day in 
England. It was in Dover, in a big hotel, in a bedroom 
with a large window looking on to the sea. He had 



52 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

been very ill and Mrs. Crane was taking him to some 
place in Germany, but one glance at that wasted face 
was enough to tell me that it was the most forlorn of all 
hopes. The last words he breathed out to me were: 
**I am tired. Give my love to your wife and child." 
When I stopped at the door for another look I saw that 
he had turned his head on the pillow and was staring 
wistfully out of the window at the sails of a cutter yacht 
that glided slowly across the frame, like a dim shadow 
against the grey sky. 

Those who have read his little tale, ^'Horses," and the 
story, "The Open Boat," in the volume of that name, 
know with what fine understanding he loved horses 
and the sea. And his passage on this earth was like 
that of a horseman riding swiftly in the dawn of a day 
fated to be short and without sunshine. 



TALES OF THE SEA 

1898 

It is by his irresistible power to reach the adventu- 
rous side in the character, not onlv of his own but of all 
nations, that Marryat is largely human. He is the 
enslaver of youth, not by the literary artifices of 
presentation, but by the natural glamour of his own 
temperament. To his young heroes the beginning of 
life is a splendid and warlike lark, ending at last in 
inheritance and marriage. His novels are not the out- 
come of his art, but of his character, like the deeds that 
make up his record of naval service. To the artist 
his work is interesting as a completely successful ex- 
pression of an unartistic nature. It is absolutely 
amazing to us, as the disclosure of the spirit animating 
the stirring time when the nineteenth century was 
young. There is an air of fable about it. Its loss 
would be irreparable, like the curtailment of national 
story or the loss of a historical document. It is the 
beginning and the embodiment of an inspiring tradition. 

To this writer of the sea the sea was not an element. 
It was a stage, where was displayed an exhibition of 
valour, and of such achievement as the world had never 
seen before. The greatness of that achievement can- 
not be pronounced imaginary, since its reality has 
affected the destinies of nations; nevertheless, in its 
grandeur it has all the remoteness of an ideal. His- 
tory preserves the skeleton of facts and, here and 
there, a figure or a name; but it is in Marry at's novels 

53 



54 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

that we find the mass of the nameless, that we see them 
in the flesh, that we obtain a ghmpse of the everyday 
Hfe and an insight into the spirit animating the crowd 
of obscure men who knew how to build for their coimtry 
such a shining monument of memories. 

Marryat is really a writer of the Service. What sets 
him apart is his fidelity. His pen serves his country 
as well as did his professional skill and his renowned 
courage. His figures move about between water and 
sky, and the water and the sky are there only to frame 
the deeds of the Service. His novels, like amphibious 
creatures, live on the sea and frequent the shore, where 
they flounder deplorably. The loves and the hates of 
his boys are as primitive as their virtues and their vices. 
His women, from the beautiful Agnes to the witch-like 
mother of Lieutenant Vanslyperken, are, with the ex- 
ception of the sailors' wives, like the shadows of what 
has never been. His Silvas, his Ribieras, his Shriftens, 
his Delmars remind us of people we have heard of some- 
where, many times, without ever believing in their 
existence. His morality is honourable and conventional. 
There is cruelty in his fun and he can invent puns in the 
midst of carnage. His naiveties are perpetrated in a 
lurid light. There is an endless variety of types, all 
surface, with hard edges, with memorable eccentricities 
of outline, with a childish and heroic effect in the draw- 
ing. They do not belong to life; they belong exclu- 
sively to the Service. And yet they live; there is a 
truth in them, the truth of their time; a headlong, reck- 
less audacity, an intimacy with violence, an unthinking 
fearlessness, and an exuberance of vitality which only 
years of war and victories can give. His adventures are 
enthralling; the rapidity of his action fascinates; his 
method is crude, his sentimentality, obviously incidental, 
is often factitious. His greatness is undeniable. 



TALES OF THE SEA 55 

It is undeniable. To a multitude of readers the navy 
of to-day is Marryat's navy still. He has created a 
priceless legend. If he be not immortal, yet he will 
last long enough for the highest ambition, because he 
has dealt manfully with an inspiring phase in the 
history of that Service on which the life of his coimtry 
depends. The tradition of the great past he has fixed 
in his pages will be cherished for ever as the guarantee 
of the future. He loved his country first, the Service 
next, the sea perhaps not at all. But the sea loved him 
without reserve. It gave him his professional distinc- 
tion and his author's fame — a fame such as not often 
falls to the lot of a true artist. 

At the same time, on the other side of the Atlantic, 
another man wrote of the sea with true artistic instinct. 
He is not invincibly young and heroic; he is mature and 
human, though for him also the stress of adventure and 
endeavour must end fatally in inheritance and marriage. 
For James Fenimore Cooper nature was not the frame- 
work, it was an essential part of existence. He could 
hear its voice, he could understand its silence, and he 
could interpret both for us in his prose with all that 
felicity and sureness of effect that belong to a poetical 
conception alone. His fame, as wide but less brilliant 
than that of his contemporary, rests mostly on a novel 
which is not of the sea. But he loved the sea and 
looked at it with consummate understanding. In his 
sea tales the sea inter-penetrates with life; it is in a 
subtle way a factor in the problem of existence, and, 
for all its greatness, it is always in touch with the men, 
who, bound on errands of war or gain, traverse its 
immense solitudes. His descriptions have the magis- 
tral ampleness of a gesture indicating the sweep of a 
vast horizon. They embrace the colours of sunset, the 
peace of starlight, the aspects of calm and storm, the 



56 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

great loneliness of the waters, the stillness of watchful 
coasts, and the alert readiness which marks men who 
live face to face with the promise and the menace of the 
sea. 

He knows the men and he knows the sea. His method 
may be often faulty, but his art is genuine. The truth 
is within him. The road to legitimate realism is 
through poetical feeling, and he possesses that — only it 
is expressed in the leisurely manner of his time. He 
has the knowledge of simple hearts. Long Tom Coffin 
is a monumental seaman with the individuality of life 
and the significance of a type. It is hard to believe that 
Manual and Borroughcliffe, Mr. Marble of Marble- 
Head, Captain Tuck of the packet-ship Montauk, or 
Daggett, the tenacious commander of the Sea Lion of 
Martha's Vineyard, must pass away some day and be 
utterly forgotten. His sympathy is large, and his 
humour is as genuine — and as perfectly unaffected — as 
is his art. In certain passages he reaches, very simply, 
the heights of inspired vision. 

He wrote before the great American language was 
bom, and he wrote as well as any novelist of his time. 
If he pitches upon episodes redounding to the glory of 
the young republic, surely England has glory enough to 
forgive him, for the sake of his excellence, the patriotic 
bias at her expense. The interest of his tales is con- 
vincing and unflagging; and there runs through his 
work a steady vein of friendliness for the old country 
which the succeeding generations of his compatriots 
have replaced by a less definite sentiment. 

Perhaps no two authors of fiction influenced so many 
Kves and gave to so many the initial impulse towards 
a glorious or a useful career. Through the distances 
of space and time those two men of another race have 
shaped also the life of the writer of this appreciation. 



TALES OF THE SEA 57 

Life is life, and art is art — and truth is hard to find in 
either. Yet in testimony to the achievement of both 
these authors it may be said that, in the case of the 
writer at least, the youthful glamour, the headlong 
vitality of the one and the profound sympathy, the 
artistic insight of the other — to which he had sur- 
rendered — have withstood the brutal shock of facts and 
the wear of laborious years. He has never regretted 
his surrender. 



AN OBSERVER IN MALAYA^ 

1898 

In his new volume, Mr. Hugh Clifford, at the begin- 
ning of the sketch entitled "At the Heels of the White 
Man," expresses his anxiety as to the state of Eng- 
land's account in the Day-Book of the Recording An- 
gel "for the good and the bad we have done — both 
with the most excellent intentions." The intentions ' 
will, no doubt, count for something, though, of course, 
every nation's conquests are paved with good inten- 
tions; or it may be that the Recording Angel, looking 
compassionately at the strife of hearts, may disdain to 
enter into the Eternal Book the facts of a struggle which 
has the reward of its righteousness even on this earth — 
in victory and lasting greatness, or in defeat and 
humiliation. 

And, also, love will count for much. If the opinion 
of a looker-on from afar is worth anything, Mr. Hugh 
Clifford's anxiety about his country's record is needless. 
To the Malays whom he governs, instructs, and guides 
he is the embodiment of the intentions, of the con- 
science and might of his race. And of all the nations 
conquering distant territories in the name of the most 
excellent intentions, England alone sends out men who, 
with such a transparent sincerity of feeling, can speak, 
as Mr. Clifford does, of the place of toil and exile as 
"the land which is very dear to me, where the best years 
of my life have been spent" — and where (I would 

1 "Studies in Brown Humanity. ' ' By Hugh Clifford. 

58 



AN OBSERVER IN MALAYA 59 

stake my right hand on it) his name is pronounced with 
respect and affection by those brown men about whom 
he writes. 

All these studies are on a high level of interest, 
though not all on the same level. The descriptive 
chapters, results of personal observation, seem to me 
the most interesting. And, indeed, in a book of this 
kind it is the author's personality which awakens the 
greatest interest; it shapes itself before one in the ring 
of sentences, it is seen between the lines — like the 
progress of a traveller in the jungle that may be traced 
by the soimd of the parang chopping the swaying 
creepers, while the man himself is glimpsed, now and 
then, indistinct and passing between the trees. Thus 
in his very vagueness of appearance, the writer seen 
through the leaves of his book becomes a fascinating 
companion in a land of fascination. 

It is when dealing with the aspects of nature that Mr. 
Hugh Clifford is most convincing. He looks upon them 
I lovingly, for the land is "very dear to him," and he 
' records his cherished impressions so that the forest, the 
great flood, the jungle, the rapid river, and the menac- 
ing rock dwell in the memory of the reader long after 
the book is closed. He does not say anything, in so 
many words, of his affection for those who live amid 
the scenes he describes so well, but his humanity is 
large enough to pardon us if we suspect him of such 
a rare weakness. In his preface he expresses the re- 
gret at not having the gifts (whatever they may be) of 
the kailyard school, or — looking up to a very different 
plane — the genius of Mr. Barrie. He has, however, 
gifts of his own, and his genius has served his country 
and his fortunes in another direction. Yet it is when 
attempting what he professes himself unable to do, in 
telling us the simple story of Umat, the punkah-puller 



60 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

with unaffected simplicity and half-concealed tender- 
ness, that he comes nearest to artistic achievement. 

Each study in this volume presents some idea, il- 
lustrated by a fact told without artifice, but with an 
effective sureness of knowledge. The story of Tukang 
Burok's love, related in the old man's own words, con- 
veys the very breath of Malay thought and speech. 
In "His Little Bill," the coolie, Lim Teng Wah, facing 
his debtor, stands very distinct before us, an insignifi- 
cant and tragic victim of fate with whom he had 
quarrelled to the death over a matter of seven dollars 
and sixty-eight cents. The story of "The Schooner 
with a Past" may be heard, from the Straits eastward, 
with many variations. Out in the Pacific the schooner 
becomes a cutter, and the pearl-divers are replaced by 
the Black-birds of the Labour Trade. But Mr. Hugh 
Clifford's variation is very good. There is a passage 
in it — a trifle — just the diver as seen coming from the 
depths, that in its dozen lines or so attains to distinct 
artistic value. And, scattered through the book, there 
are many other passages of almost equal descriptive 
excellence. 

Nevertheless, to apply artistic standards to this book 
would be a fundamental error in appreciation. Like 
faith, enthusiasm, or heroism, art veils part of the truth 
of life to make the rest appear more splendid, inspiring, 
or sinister. And this book is only truth, interesting and 
futile, truth unadorned, simple and straightforward. 
The Resident of Pahang has the devoted friendship of 
Umat, the punkah-puller, he has an individual faculty 
of vision, a large sympathy, and the scrupulous con- 
sciousness of the good and evil in his hands. He may 
as well rest content with such gifts. One cannot expect 
to be, at the same time, a ruler of men and an irre- 
proachable player on the flute. 



A HAPPY WANDERER 
1910 

Converts are interesting people. Most of us, if you 
will pardon me for betraying the universal secret, have, 
at some time or other, discovered in ourselves a readiness 
to stray far, ever so far, on the wrong road. And what 
did we do in our pride and our cowardice? Casting 
fearful glances and waiting for a dark moment, we 
buried our discovery discreetly, and kept on in the old 
direction, on that old, beaten track we have not had 
courage enough to leave, and which we perceive now 
more clearly than before to be but the arid way of the 
grave. 

The convert, the man capable of grace (I am speaking 
here in a secular sense), is not discreet. His pride is 
of another kind; he jumps gladly off the track — the 
touch of grace is mostly sudden — and facing about in a 
new direction may even attain the illusion of having 
turned his back on Death itself. 

Some converts have, indeed, earned immortality by 
their exquisite indiscretion. The most illustrious ex- 
ample of a convert, that Flower of chivalry, Don 
Quixote de la Mancha, remains for all the world the only 
genuine immortal hidalgo. The delectable Knight of 
Spain became converted, as you know, from the ways of 
a small country squire to an imperative faith in a tender 
and sublime mission. Forthwith he was beaten with 
sticks and in due course shut up in a wooden cage by 
the Barber and the Priest, the fit ministers of a justly 
shocked social order. I do not know if it has occurred 

61 



62 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

to anybody yet to shut up Mr. Luffmann in a wooden 
cage.^ I do not raise the point because I wish him any 
harm. Quite the contrary. I am a humane person. 
Let him take it as the highest praise — but I must say, 
that he richly deserves that sort of attention. I 

On the other hand I would not have him unduly 
puffed up with the pride of the exalted association. 
The grave wisdom, the admirable amenity, the serene 
grace of the secular patron-saint of all mortals converted 
to noble visions are not his. Mr. Luffmann has no mis- 
sion. He is no Knight sublimely Errant. But he is 
an excellent Vagabond. He is full of merit. That 
peripatetic guide, philosopher and friend of all nations, 
Mr. Roosevelt, would promptly excommunicate him 
with a big stick. The truth is that the ex-autocrat of 
all the States does not like rebels against the sullen 
order of our universe. Make the best of it or perish — 
he cries. A sane lineal successor of the Barber and the 
Priest, and a sagacious political heir of the incompa- 
rable Sancho Panza (another great Governor), that 
distinguished litterateur has no mercy for dreamers. 
And our author happens to be a man of (you may trace 
them in his books) some rather fine reveries. ^ 

Every convert begins by being a rebel, and I do not 
see myself how any mercy can possibly be extended to 
Mr. Luffmann. He is a convert from the creed of 
strenuous life. For this renegade the body is of little 
account; to him work appears criminal when it sup- 
presses the demands of the inner life; while he was 
young he did grind virtuously at the sacred handle, and 
now, he says, he has fallen into disgrace with some 
people because he believes no longer in toil without end. 
Certain respectable folk hate him — so he says — ^because 



1" Quiet Days in Spain," by C. Bogue Luffmann. 



A HAPPY WANDERER 63 

he dares to think that "poetry, beauty, and the broad 
face of the world are the best things to be in love 
with," He confesses to loving Spain on the ground that 
she is "the land of to-morrow, and holds the gospel of 
never-mind." The universal striving to push ahead he 
considers mere vulgar folly. Didn't I tell you he was 
a fit subject for the cage? 

It is a relief (we are all humane, are we not?) to dis- 
cover that this desperate character is not altogether 
an outcast. Little girls seem to like him. One of them, 
after listening to some of his tales, remarked to her 
mother, "Wouldn't it be lovely if what he says were 
true!" Here you have Woman! The charming crea- 
tures will neither strain at a camel nor swallow a gnat. 
Not publicly. These operations, without which the 
world they have such a large share in could not go on 
for ten minutes, are left to us — men. And then we are 
chided for being coarse. This is a refined objection 
but does not seem fair. Another little girl — or perhaps 
the same little girl — wrote to him in Cordova "I hope 
Poste-Restante is a nice place, and that you are very 
comfortable." Woman again! I have in my time told 
some stories which are (I hate false modesty) both true 

. and lovely. Yet no little girl ever wrote to me in kindly 
terms. And why? Simply because I am not enough 

1 of a Vagabond. The dear despots of the fireside have 
a weakness for lawless characters. This is amiable, 
but does not seem rational. 

Being Quixotic, Mr. Luffmann is no Impressionist. 

I He is far too earnest in his heart, and not half suf- 

I, ficiently precise in his style to be that. But he is an 
excellent narrator. More than any Vagabond I have 

, ever met, he knows what he is about. There is not one 
of his quiet days which is dull. You will find in them 
a love-story not made up, the coup-de-foudre, the 



64 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

lightning-stroke of Spanish love; and you will marvel 
how a spell so sudden and vehement can be at the same 
time so tragically delicate. You will find there land- 
ladies devoured with jealousy, astute housekeepers, 
delightful boys, wise peasants, touchy shopkeepers, all 
the Cosas de Espana — and, in addition, the pale girl 
Rosario. I recommend that pathetic and silent victim 
of fate to your benevolent compassion. You will find 
in his pages the humours of starving workers of the soil, 
the vision among the mountains of an exulting mad 
spirit in a mighty body, and many other visions worthy 
of attention. And they are exact visions, for this 
idealist is no visionary. He is in sympathy with 
suffering mankind, and has a grasp on real human 
affairs. I mean the great and pitiful affairs concerned 
with bread, love, and the obscure, unexpressed needs 
which drive great crowds to prayer in the holy places of 
the earth. 

But I like his conception of what a "quiet" life is 
like! His quiet days require no fewer than forty-two 
of the forty-nine provinces of Spain to take their ease 
in. For his unquiet days, I presume, the seven — or is 
it nine.^ — crystal spheres of Alexandrian cosmogony 
would afford but a wretchedly straitened space. A 
most unconventional thing is his notion of quietness. 
One would take it as a joke; only that, perchance, to the 
author of "Quiet Days in Spain" all days may seem 
quiet, because, a courageous convert, he is now at peace 
with himself. 

How better can we take leave of this interesting 
Vagabond than with the road salutation of passing 
wayfarers: "And on you be peace! . . . You 
have chosen your ideal, and it is a good choice. There's 
nothing like giving up one's life to an unselfish passion. 
Let the rich and the powerful of this globe preach their 



A HAPPY WANDERER 65 

sound gospel of palpable progress. The part of the 
ideal you embrace is the better one, if only in its 
illusions. No great passion can be barren. May a 
world of gracious and poignant images attend the lofty 
solitude of your renunciation!" 



,i 



THE LIFE BEYOND 

1910 

You have no doubt noticed that certain books pro- 
duce a sort of physical effect on one — mostly an audible 
effect. I am not alluding here to Blue books or to books 
of statistics. The effect of these is simply exasperating 
and no more. No ! the books I have in mind are just 
the common books of commerce you and I read when 
we have five minutes to spare, the usual hired books 
published by ordinary publishers, printed by ordinary 
printers, and censored (when they happen to be novels) 
by the usual circulating libraries, the guardians of our 
firesides, whose names are household words within the 
four seas. 

To see the fair and the brave of this free country 
surrendering themselves with unbounded trust to the 
direction of the circulating libraries is very touching. 
It is even, in a sense, a beautiful spectacle, because, as 
you know, humility is a rare and fragrant virtue; and 
what can be more humble than to surrender your morals 
and your intellect to the judgment of one of your 
tradesmen.'^ I suppose that there are some very per- 
fect people who allow the Army and Navy stores to 
censor their diet. So much merit, however, I imagine, 
is not frequently met with here below. The flesh, 
alas! is weak, and — from a certain point of view — so 
important ! • 

A superficial person might be rendered miserable by 
the simple question: What would become of us if the 

66 



THE LIFE BEYOND 67 

circulating libraries ceased to exist? It is a horrid and 
almost indelicate supposition, but let us be brave and 
face the truth. On this earth of ours nothing lasts. 
Tout passe, tout casse, tout lasse. Imagine the utter 
wreck overtaking the morals of our beautiful country 
houses should the circulating libraries suddenly die! 
But pray do not shudder. There is no occasion. 

Their spirit shall survive. I declare this from inward 
conviction, and also from scientific information received 
lately. For observe : the circulating libraries are human 
institutions. I beg you to follow me closely. They are 
human institutions, and being human, they are not 
animal, and, therefore, they are spiritual. Thus, any 
man with enough money to take a shop, stock his 
shelves, and pay for advertisements shall be able to 
evoke the pure and censorious spectre of the circulating 
libraries whenever his own commercial spirit moves 
him. 

For, and this is the information alluded to above. 
Science, having in its infinite wanderings run up against 
various wonders and mysteries, is apparently willing 
now to allow a spiritual quality to man and, I conclude, 
to all his works as well. 

I do not know exactly what this "Science" may be; 
and I do not think that anybody else knows; but that is 
the information stated shortly. It is contained in a 
book reposing under my thoughtful eyes.^ I know it 
is not a censored book, because I can see for myself that 
it is not a novel. The author, on his side, warns me 
that it is not philosophy, that it is not metaphysics, 
that it is not natural science. After this comprehensive 
warning, the definition of the book becomes, you will 
admit, a pretty hard nut to crack. 



1" Existence After Death Implied by Science," by Jasper B. Hunt, M.A. 



68 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

But meantime let us return for a moment to my 
opening remark about the physical effect of some 
common, hired books. A few of them (not necessarily 
books of verse) are melodious; the music some others 
make for you as you read has the disagreeable emphasis 
of a barrel-organ; the tinkling-cymbals book (it was 
not written by a humorist) I only met once. But there 
is infinite variety in the noises books do make. I have 
now on my shelves a book apparently of the most 
valuable kind which, before I have read half-a-dozen 
lines, begins to make a noise like a buzz-saw. I am 
inconsolable; I shall never, I fear, discover what it is all 
about, for the buzzing covers the words, and at every 
try I am absolutely forced to give it up ere the end of the 
page is reached. 

The book, however, which I have found so difficult to 
define, is by no means noisy. As a mere piece of writing 
it may be described as being breathless itself and taking 
the reader's breath away, not by the magnitude of its 
message but by a sort of anxious volubility in the 
delivery. The constantly elusive argument and the 
illustrative quotations go on without a single reflective 
pause. For this reason alone the reading of that work 
is a fatiguing process. 

The author himself (I use his own words) "suspects 
that what he has written "may be theology after all. 
It may be. It is not my place either to allay or to con- 
firm the author's suspicion of his own work. But I will 
state its main thesis: "That science regarded in the 
gross dictates the spirituality of man and strongly im- 
plies a spiritual destiny for individual human beings." 
This means: Existence after Death — that is, Immor- 
tality. 

To find out its value you must go to the book. But 
I will observe here that an Immortality liable at any 



99 



k I 



THE LIFE BEYOND 69 

moment to betray itself fatuously by the forcible 
incantations of Mr. Stead or Professor Crookes is 
scarcely worth having. Can you imagine anything 
more squalid than an Immortality at the beck and call 
of Eusapia Palladino.'^ That woman lives on the top 
floor of a Neapolitan house, and gets our poor, pitiful, 
august dead, flesh of our flesh, bone of our bone, spirit 
of our spirit, who have loved, suffered and died, as we 
must love, suffer, and die — she gets them to beat 
tambourines in a corner and protrude shadowy limbs 
through a curtain. This is particularly horrible, be- 
cause, if one had to put one's faith in these things one 
could not even die safely from disgust, as one would 
long to do. 

And to believe that these manifestations, which the 
author evidently takes for modern miracles, will stay 
our tottering faith; to believe that the new psychology 
has, only the other day, discovered man to be a "spiri- 
tual mystery," is really carrying humility towards that 
universal provider. Science, too far. 

We moderns have complicated our old perplexities to 
the point of absurdity; our perplexities older than re- 
ligion itself. It is not for nothing that for so many 
centuries the priest, mounting the steps of the altar, 
murmurs, "Why art thou sad, my soul, and why dost 
thou trouble me?" Since the day of Creation two 
veiled figures. Doubt and Melancholy, are pacing end- 
lessly in the sunshine of the world. What humanity 
needs is not the promise of scientific immortality, but 
compassionate pity in this life and infinite mercy on the 
Day of Judgment. 

And, for the rest, during this transient hour of our 
pilgrimage, we may well be content to repeat the In- 
vocation of Sar Peladan. Sar Peladan was an occultist. 



< 



70 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

a seer, a modern magician. He believed in astrology, 
in the spirits of the air, in elves; he was marvellously 
and deliciously absurd. Incidentally he wrote some in- 
comprehensible poems and a few pages of harmonious 
prose, for, you must know, "a magician is nothing else 
but a great harmonist." Here are some eight lines of 
the magnificent Invocation. Let me, however, warn 
you, strictly between ourselves, that my translation is 
execrable. I am sorry to say I am no magician. 

"O Nature, indulgent Mother, forgive! Open your 
arms to the son, prodigal and weary. 

"I have attempted to tear asunder the veil you have 
hung to conceal from us the pain of life, and I have been 
wounded by the mystery . . . QEdipus, half way 
to finding the word of the enigma, young Faust, regret- 
ting already the simple life, the life of the heart, I come 
back to you repentant, reconciled, O gentle deceiver!" 



I 



f 



THE ASCENDING EFFORT 

1910 

Much good paper has been lamentably wasted to 
prove that science has destroyed, that it is destroying, 
or, some day, may destroy poetry. Meantime, un- 
blushing, unseen, and ofter unheard, the guileless poets 
have gone on singing in a sweet strain. How they dare 
do the impossible and virtually forbidden thing is a 
cause for wonder but not for legislation. Not yet. We 
are at present too busy reforming the silent burglar and 
planning concerts to soothe the savage breast of the 
yelling hooligan. As somebody — perhaps a publisher — 
said lately: *' Poetry is of no account now-a-days." 

But it is not totally neglected. Those persons with 
gold-rimmed spectacles whose usual occupation is to 
spy upon the obvious have remarked audibly (on several 
occasions) that poetry has so far not given to science 
any acknowledgment worthy of its distinguished posi- 
tion in the popular mind. Except that Tennyson 
looked down the throat of a foxglove, that Erasmus 
Darwin wrote "The Loves of the Plants" and a scoffer 
"The Loves of the Triangles," poets have been sup- 
posed to be indecorously blind to the progress of 
science. What tribute, for instance, has poetry paid 
to electricity .f* All I can remember on the spur of the 
moment is Mr. Arthur Symons' line about arc lamps: 
"Hung with the globes of some unnatural fruit." 

Commerce and Manufacture praise on every hand 
in their not mute but inarticulate way the glories of 

71 



72 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

science. Poetry does not play its part. Behold John 
Keats, skilful with the surgeon's knife; but when he 
writes poetry his inspiration is not from the operating 
table. Here I am reminded, though, of a modern in- 
stance to the contrary in prose. Mr. H. G. Wells, who, 
as far as I know, has never written a line of verse, was 
inspired a few years ago to write a short story, "Under 
the Kiiife." Out of a clock-dial, a brass rod, and a 
whiff of chloroform, he has conjured for us a sensation 
of space and eternity, evoked the face of the Unknow- 
able, and an awesome, august voice, like the voice of the 
Judgment Day; a great voice, perhaps the voice of 
science itself, uttering the words: "There shall be no 
more pain!" I advise you to look up that story, so 
human and so intimate, because Mr. Wells, the writer of 
prose whose amazing inventiveness we all know, re- 
mains a poet even in his most perverse moments of 
scorn for things as they are. His poetic imagination is 
sometimes even greater than his inventiveness, I am notf 
afraid to say. But, indeed, imaginative faculty would, 
make any man a poet — were he born without tongue' 
for speech and without hands to seize his fancy and 
fasten her down to a wretched piece of paper. ^ i 

The book^ which in the course of the last few days I 
have opened and shut several times is not imaginative. 
But, on the other hand, it is not a dumb book, as some 
are. It has even a sort of sober and serious eloquence, 
reminding us that not poetry alone is at fault in this 
matter. Mr. Bourne begins his "Ascending Effort" 
with a remark by Sir Francis Galton upon Eugenics 
that "if the principles he was advocating were to be- 
come effective they must be introduced into the na- 



i**The Ascending Effort/* by George Bourne. 



THE ASCENDING EFFORT 73 

tional conscience, like a new religion.'^ "Introduced" 
suggests compulsory vaccination. Mr. Bourne, who is 
not a theologian, wishes to league together not science 
and religion, but science and the arts. "The intoxi- 
cating power of art," he thinks, is the very thing needed 
to give the desired effect to the doctrines of science. In 
uninspired phrase he points to the arts playmg once upon 
a time a part in "popularizmg the Christian tenets." 
With painstaking fervour as great as the fervour of 
prophets, but not so persuasive, he foresees the arts 
some day popularizing science. Until that day dawns, 
science will continue to be lame and poetry blind. He 
himself cannot smooth or even point out the way, 
though he thinks that "a really prudent people would 
be greedy of beauty," and their public authorities 

as careful of the sense of comfort as of sanitation." 
^ As the writer of those admirable rustic note-books 
The Bettesworth Book" and "Memoirs of a Surrey 
Labourer," the author has a claim upon our attention. 
But his seriousness, his patience, his almost touching 
smcerity, can only command the respect of his readers 
and nothmg more. He is obsessed by science, haunted 
and shadowed by it, until he has been bewildered into 
awe. He knows, indeed, that art owes its triumphs 
and its subtle influence to the fact that it issues straight 
from our organic vitality, and is a movement of life-cells 
with their matchless unintellectual knowledge. But 
the fact that poetry does not seem obviously in love 
with science has never made him doubt whether it 
may not be an argument against his haste to see 
the marriage ceremony performed amid public reioic- 
,ings. 

f Many a man has heard or read and believes that the 
3arth goes round the sun; one small blob of mud among 
Jeveral others, spinning ridiculously with a waggling 



74 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

motion like a top about to fall. This is the Copernican 
system, and the man believes in the system without 
often knowing as much about it as its name. But 
while watching a sunset he sheds his belief; he sees the 
sun as a small and useful object, the servant of his needs 
and the witness of his ascending effort, sinking slowly 
behind a range of mountains, and then he holds the 
system of Ptolemy. He holds it without knowing it. I 
In the same way a poet hears, reads, and believes af 
thousand undeniable truths which have not yet got into 
his blood, nor will do after reading Mr. Bourne's book; 
he writes, therefore, as if neither truths nor book existed. 
Life and the arts follow dark courses, and will not turn, j 
aside to the brilliant arc-lights of science. Some day, 
without a doubt, — and it may be a consolation to Mr. 
Bourne to know it — fully informed critics will point 
out that Mr. Davies's poem on a dark woman combing 
her hair must have been written after the invasion of 
appendicitis, and that Mr. Yeats's "Had I the heaven's 
embroidered cloths" came before radium was quite un- 
necessarily dragged out of its respectable obscurity 
in pitchblende to upset the venerable (and compara- 
tively naive) chemistry of our young days. 

There are times when the tyranny of science and the 
cant of science are alarming, but there are other times 
when they are entertaining — and this is one of them. 
"Many a man prides himself," says Mr. Bourne, "on his 
piety or his views of art, whose whole range of ideas, 
could they be investigated, would be found ordinary, 
if not base, because they have been adopted in com- 
pliance with some external persuasion or to serve some 
timid purpose instead of proceeding authoritatively 
from the living selection of his hereditary taste." This 
extract is a fair sample of the book's thought and of its 
style. But Mr. Bourne seems to forget that "persua- j 



i 



THE ASCENDING EFFORT 75 

sion" is a vain thing. The appreciation of great art 
comes from within. 

It is but the merest justice to say that the transparent 
honesty of Mr. Bourne's purpose is undeniable. But 
the whole book is simply an earnest expression of a pious 
wish; and, like the generality of pious wishes, this one 
seems of little dynamic value — besides being im- 
practicable. 

Yes, indeed. Art has served Religion; artists have 
found the most exalted inspiration in Christianity; but 
the light of Transfiguration which has illuminated the 
profoundest mysteries of our sinful souls is not the 
light of the generating stations, which exposes the 
depths of our infatuation where our mere cleverness is 
permitted for a while to grope for the imessential among 
invincible shadows. 



THE CENSOR OF PLAYS 

An Appreciation 
1907 

A COUPLE of years ago I was moved to write a one-act 
play — and I lived long enough to accomplish the task. 
We live and learn. When the play was finished I was 
informed that it had to be licensed for performance. 
Thus I learned of the existence of the Censor of Plays. 
I may say without vanity that I am intelligent enough 
to have been astonished by that piece of information: 
for facts must stand in some relation to time and space, 
and I was aware of being in England — in the twentieth- 
century England. The fact did not fit the date and 
the place. That was my first thought. It was, in 
short, an improper fact. I beg you to believe that I 
am writing in all seriousness and am weighing my words 
scrupulously. 

Therefore I don't say inappropriate. I say im- 
proper — that is: something to be ashamed of. And 
at first this impression was confirmed by the obscurity 
in which the figure embodying this after all consider- 
able fact had its being. The Censor of Plays! His 
name was not in the mouths of all men. Far from it. 
He seemed stealthy and remote. There was about 
that figure the scent of the Far East, like the peculiar 
atmosphere of a Mandarin's back yard, and the 
mustiness of the Middle Ages, that epoch when 
mankind tried to stand still in a monstrous illusion 

76 



THE CENSOR OF PLAYS 77 

of final certitude attained in morals, intellect and 
conscience. 

It was a disagreeable impression. But I reflected 
that probably the censorship of plays was an inactive 
monstrosity; not exactly a survival, since it seemed ob- 
viously at variance with the genius of the people, but 
an heirloom of past ages, a bizarre and imported curi- 
osity preserved because of that weakness one has for 
one's old possessions apart from any intrinsic value; 
one more object of exotic virtu, an oriental potiche, 
a magot chinois conceived by a childish and extrava- 
gant imagination, but allowed to stand in stolid impo- 
tence in the twilight of the upper shelf. 

Thus I quieted my uneasy mind. Its uneasiness 
had nothing to do with the fate of my one-act play. 
The play was duly produced, and an exceptionally 
intelligent audience stared it coldly off the boards. 
It ceased to exist. It was a fair and open execution. 
But having survived the freezing atmosphere of that 
auditorium I continued to exist, labouring under no 
sense of wrong. I was not pleased, but I was content. 
I was content to accept the verdict of a free and inde- 
pendent public, judging after its conscience the work 
of its free, independent and conscientious servant — 
the artist. 

Only thus can the dignity of artistic servitude be pre- 
served — ^not to speak of the bare existence of the artist 
and the self-respect of the man. I shall say nothing 
of the self-respect of the public. To the self-respect of 
the public the present appeal against the censorship is 
being made and I join in it with all my heart. 

For I have lived long enough to learn that the 
monstrous and outlandish figure, the magot chinois 
whom I believed to be but a memorial of our fore- 
fathers' mental aberration, that grotesque potiche 



78 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

works! The absurd and hollow creature of clay seems 
to be alive with a sort of (surely) unconscious life worthy 
of its traditions. It heaves its stomach, it rolls its 
eyes, it brandishes a monstrous arm: and with the 
censorship, like a Bravo of old Venice with a more car- 
nal weapon, stabs its victim from behind in the twilight 
of its upper shelf. Less picturesque than the Venetian 
in cloak and mask, less estimable, too, in this, that the 
assassin plied his moral trade at his own risk deriving 
no countenance from the powers of the Republic, it 
stands more malevolent, inasmuch that the Bravo 
striking in the dusk killed but the body, whereas the 
grotesque thing nodding its mandarin head may in its 
absurd unconsciousness strike down at any time the 
spirit of an honest, of an artistic, perhaps of a sublime 
creation. 

This Chinese monstrosity, disguised in the trousers 
of the Western Barbarian and provided by the State 
with the immortal Mr. Stiggins's plug hat and umbrella, 
is with us. It is an office. An office of trust. And 
from time to time there is found an official to fill it. 
He is a public man. The least prominent of public 
men, the most unobtrusive, the most obscure if not 
the most modest. 

But however obscure, a public man may be told the 
truth if only once in his life. His office flourishes in 
the shade; not in the rustic shade beloved of the violet 
but in the muddled twilight of mind where tyranny 
of every sort flourishes. Its holder need not have 
either brain or heart, no sight, no taste, no imagination, 
not even bowels of compassion. He needs not these 
things. He has power. He can kill thought, and inci- 
dentally truth, and incidentally beauty, providing 
they seek to live in a dramatic form. He can do it, 
without seeing, without understanding, without feeling 



THE CENSOR OF PLAYS 79 

anything; out of mere stupid suspicion, as an irrespon- 
sible Roman Caesar could kill a senator. He can do 
that and there is no one to say him nay. He may 
call his cook (Moliere used to do that) from below and 
give her ^ve acts to judge every morning as a matter 
of constant practice and still remain the unquestioned 
destroyer of men's honest work. He may have a 
glass too much. This accident has happened to per- 
sons of unimpeachable morality — to gentlemen. He 
may suffer from spells of imbecility like Clodius. He 
may' . . . what might he not do! I tell you he 
is the Caesar of the dramatic world. There has been 
since the Roman Principate nothing in the way of irre- 
sponsible power to compare with the office of the 
Censor of Plays. 

Looked at in this way it has some grandeur, some- 
thing colossal in the odious and the absurd. This 
figure in whose power it is to suppress an intellectual 
conception — to kill thought (a dream for a mad brain, 
my masters !) — seems designed in a spirit of bitter com- 
edy to bring out the greatness of a Philistine's conceit 
and his moral cowardice. 

But this is England in the twentieth century, and 
one wonders that there can be found a man courageous 
enough to occupy the post. It is a matter for medita- 
tion. Having given it a few minutes I come to the 
conclusion in the serenity of my heart and the peace 
of my conscience that he must be either an extreme 
megalomaniac or an utterly unconscious being. 

He must be unconscious. It is one of the quali- 
fications for his magistracy. Other qualifications 
are equally easy. He must have done nothing, ex- 
pressed nothing, imagined nothing. He must be 
obscure, insignificant and mediocre — in thought, act, 
speech and sympathy. He must know nothing of art. 



80 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

of life — and of himself. For if he did he would not 
dare to be what he is. Like that much questioned and 
mysterious bird, the phoenix, he sits amongst the cold 
ashes of his predecessor upon the altar of morality, alone 
of his kind in the sight of wondering generations. 

And I will end with a quotation reproducing not 
perhaps the exact words but the true spirit of a lofty 
conscience. 

"Often when sitting down to write the notice of a 
play, especially when I felt it antagonistic to my can- 
ons of art, to my tastes or my convictions, I hesitated 
in the fear lest my conscientious blame might check the 
development of a great talent, my sincere judgment 
condemn a worthy mind. With the pen poised in my 
hand I hesitated, whispering to myself 'What if I were 
perchance doing my part in killiug a masterpiece.'" 

Such were the lofty scruples of M. Jules Lemaitre 
— dramatist and dramatic critic, a great citizen and 
a high magistrate in the Republic of Letters; a Censor 
of Plays exercising his august oflSce openly in the light 
of day, with the authority of a European reputation. 
But then M. Jules Lemaitre is a man possessed of wis- 
dom, of great fame, of a fine conscience — not an obscure 
hollow Chinese monstrosity ornamented with Mr. 
Stiggins's plug hat and cotton umbrella by its anxious 
grandmother — the State. 

Frankly, is it not time to knock the improper object 
off its shelf .^ It has stood too long there. Hatched 
in Pekin (I should say) by some Board of Respectable 
Rites, the little caravan monster has come to us by 
way of Moscow — I suppose. It is outlandish. It is 
not venerable. It does not belong here. Is it not time 
to knock it off its dark shelf with some implement appro- 
priate to its worth and status.^ With an old broom 
handle for instance. 



PART II 
LIFE 



AUTOCRACY AND WAR 

1905 

From the firing of the first shot on the banks of the 
Sha-ho, the fate of the great battle of the Russo- 
Japanese war hung in the balance for more than a fort- 
night. The famous three-day battles, for which history 
has reserved the recognition of special pages, sink into 
insignificance before the struggles in Manchuria en- 
gaging half a million men on fronts of sixty miles, 
struggles lasting for weeks, flaming up fiercely and dy- 
ing away from sheer exhaustion, to flame up again in 
desperate persistence, and end — as we have seen them 
end more than once — not from the victor obtaining a 
crushing advantage, but through the mortal weariness 
of the combatants. 

We have seen these things, though we have seen them 
only in the cold, silent, colourless print of books and 
newspapers. In stigmatising the printed word as 
cold, silent and colourless, I have no intention of 
putting a slight upon the fidelity and the talents of men 
who have provided us with words to read about the 
battles in Manchuria. I only wished to suggest that in 
the nature of things, the war in the Far East has 
been made known to us, so far, in a grey reflection 
of its terrible and monotonous phases of pain, death, 
sickness; a reflection seen in the perspective of thou- 
sands of miles, in the dim atmosphere of official reti- 
cence, through the veil of inadequate words. Inade- 
quate, I say, because what had to be reproduced is 

83 



84 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

beyond the common experience of war, and our imagi- 
nation, luckily for our peace of mind, has remained a 
slumbering faculty, notwithstanding the din of humani- 
tarian talk and the real progress of humanitarian ideas. 
Direct vision of the fact, or the stimulus of a great art, 
can alone make it turn and open its eyes heavy with 
blessed sleep; and even there, as against the testimony 
of the senses and the stirring up of emotion, that saving 
callousness which reconciles us to the conditions of our 
existence, will assert itself under the guise of assent to 
fatal necessity, or in the enthusiasm of a purely esthetic 
admiration of the rendering. In this age of knowledge 
our sympathetic imagination, to which alone we can 
look for the ultimate triumph of concord and justice, 
remains strangely impervious to information, however 
correctly and even picturesquely conveyed. As to the 
vaunted eloquence of a serried array of figures, it has 
all the futility of precision without force. It is the 
exploded superstition of enthusiastic statisticians. An 
overworked horse falling in front of our windows, a man 
writhing under a cart-wheel in the street, awaken more 
genuine emotion, more horror, pity, and indignation 
than the stream of reports, appalling in their monotony, 
of tens of thousands of decaying bodies tainting the air 
of the Manchurian plains, of other tens of thousands of 
maimed bodies groaning in ditches, crawling on the 
frozen ground, filling the field hospitals; of the hun- 
dreds of thousands of survivors no less pathetic and 
even more tragic in being left alive by fate to the 
wretched exhaustion of their pitiful toil. 

An early Victorian, or perhaps a pre- Victorian, senti- 
mentalist, looking out of an upstairs window, I believe, 
at a street — perhaps Fleet Street itself — full of people, 
is reported, by an admiring friend, to have wept for joy 
at seeing so much life. These arcadian tears, this facile 



AUTOCRACY AND WAR 85 

emotion worthy of the golden age, comes to us from the 
past, with solemn approval, after the close of the 
Napoleonic wars and before the series of sanguinary 
surprises held in reserve by the nineteenth century for 
our hopeful grandfathers. We may well envy them 
their optimism of which this anecdote of an amiable 
wit and sentimentalist presents an extreme instance, 
but still, a true instance, and worthy of regard in the 
spontaneous testimony to that trust in the life of 
the earth, triumphant at last in the felicity of her 
children. Moreover, the psychology of individuals, 
even in the most extreme instances, reflects the general 
effect of the fears and hopes of its time. Wept for joy ! 
I should think that now, after eighty years, the emotion 
would be of a sterner sort. One could not imagine 
anybody shedding tears of joy at the sight of much life 
in a street, unless, perhaps, he were an enthusiastic 
officer of a general staff or a popular politician, with a 
career yet to make. And hardly even that. In the 
case of the first tears would be unprofessional, and a 
stern repression of all signs of joy at the provision of so 
much food for powder more in accord with the rules 
of prudence; the joy of the second would be checked 
before it found issue in weeping by anxious doubts as 
to the soundness of these electors' views upon the 
question of the hour, and the fear of missing the con- 
sensus of their votes. 

No! It seems that such a tender joy would be mis- 
placed now as much as ever during the last hundred 
years, to go no further back. The end of the eighteenth 
century was, too, a time of optimism and of dismal 
mediocrity in which the French Revolution exploded 
like a bomb-shell. In its lurid blaze the insufficiency of 
Europe, the inferiority of minds, of military and ad- 
ministrative systems, stood exposed with pitiless vivid- 



86 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

ness. And there is but little courage in saying at this 
time of the day that the glorified French Revolution 
itself, except for its destructive force, was in essentials 
a mediocre phenomenon. The parentage of that great 
social and political upheaval was intellectual, the idea 
was elevated; but it is the bitter fate of any idea to lose 
its royal form and power, to lose its "virtue" the mo- 
ment it descends from its solitary throne to work its will 
among the people. It is a king whose destiny is never 
to know the obedience of his subjects except at the 
cost of degradation. The degradation of the ideas of 
freedom and justice at the root of the French Revolu- 
tion is made manifest in the person of its heir; a person- 
ality without law or faith, whom it has been the fashion 
to represent as an eagle, but who was, in truth, more 
like a sort of vulture preying upon the body of a Europe 
which did, indeed, for some dozen of years, very much 
resemble a corpse. The subtle and manifold influence 
for evil of the Napoleonic episode as a school of violence, 
as a sower of national hatreds, as the direct provocator 
of obscurantism and reaction, of political tyranny and 
injustice, cannot well be exaggerated. 

The nineteenth century began with wars which were 
the issue of a corrupted revolution. It may be said 
that the twentieth begins with a war which is like the 
explosive ferment of a moral grave, whence may yet 
emerge a new political organism to take the place of a 
gigantic and dreaded phantom. For a hundred years 
the ghost of Russian might, overshadowing with its 
fantastic bulk the councils of Central and Western 
Europe, sat upon the gravestone of autocracy, cutting 
off from air, from light, from all knowledge of them- 
selves and of the world, the buried millions of Russian 
people. Not the most determined cockney senti- 
mentalist could have had the heart to weep for joy at 



AUTOCRACY AND WAR 87 

the thought of its teeming numbers! And yet they 
were living, they are ahve yet, since, through the mist 
of print, we have seen their blood freezing crimson upon 
the snow of the squares and streets of St. Petersburg; 
since their generations born in the grave are yet alive 
enough to fill the ditches and cover the fields of Man- 
churia with their torn limbs; to send up from the frozen 
ground of battlefields a chorus of groans calling for 
vengeance from Heaven; to kill and retreat, or kill and 
advance, without intermission or rest for twenty hours, 
for fifty hours, for whole weeks of fatigue, hunger, cold, 
and murder — till their ghastly labour, worthy of a 
place amongst the punishments of Dante's Inferno, 
passing through the stages of courage, of fury, of hope- 
lessness, sinks into the night of crazy despair. 

It seems that in both armies many men are driven 
beyond the bounds of sanity by the stress of moral and 
physical misery. Great numbers of soldiers and regi- 
mental officers go mad as if by way of protest against 
the peculiar sanity of a state of war: mostly among 
the Russians, of course. The Japanese have in their 
favour the tonic effect of success; and the innate gentle- 
ness of their character stands them in good stead. But 
the Japanese grand army has yet another advantage in 
this nerve-destroying contest, which for endless, ardu- 
ous toil of killing surpasses all the wars of history. It 
has a base for its operations; a base of a nature beyond 
the concern of the many books written upon the so- 
called art of war, which, considered by itself, purely as 
an exercise of human ingenuity, is at best only a thing 
of well-worn, simple artifices. The Japanese army 
has for its base a reasoned conviction; it has behind it 
the profound belief in the right of a logical necessity to 
be appeased at the cost of so much blood and treasure. 
And in that belief, whether well or ill founded, that 



88 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

army stands on the high ground of conscious assent, 
shouldering dehberately the burden of a long-tried 
faithfulness. The other people (since each people is an 
army nowadays), torn out from a miserable quietude 
resembling death itself, hurled across space, amazed, 
without starting-point of its own, or knowledge of the 
aim, can feel nothing but a horror-stricken conscious- 
ness of having mysteriously become the plaything of 
a black and merciless fate. 

The profound, the instructive nature of this war is 
resumed by the memorable difference in the spiritual 
state of the two armies; the one forlorn and dazed on 
being driven out from an abyss of mental darkness into 
the red light of a conflagration, the other with a full 
knowledge of its past and its future, "finding itself" 
as it were at every step of the trying war before the eyes 
of an astonished world. The greatness of the lesson 
has been dwarfed for most of us by an often half- 
conscious prejudice of race-difference. The West 
having managed to lodge its hasty foot on the neck of 
the East is prone to forget that it is from the East that 
the wonders of patience and wisdom have come to a 
world of men who set the value of life in the power to 
act rather than in the faculty of meditation. It has 
been dwarfed by this, and it has been obscured by a 
cloud of considerations with whose shaping wisdom and 
meditation had little or nothing to do; by the weary 
platitudes on the military situation which (apart from 
geographical conditions) is the same everlasting situ- 
ation that has prevailed since the times of Hannibal 
and Scipio, and further back yet, since the beginning of 
historical record — since prehistoric times, for that 
matter; by the conventional expressions of horror at 
the tale of maiming and killing; by the rumours of 
peace with guesses more or less plausible as to its 



AUTOCRACY AND WAR 89 

conditions. All this is made legitimate by the con- 
secrated custom of writers in such time as this — the 
time of a great war. More legitimate in view of the 
situation created in Europe are the speculations as to 
the course of events after the war. More legitimate, 
but hardly more wise than the irresponsible talk of 
strategy that never changes, and of terms of peace that 
do not matter. 

And above it all — unaccountably persistent — the 
decrepit, old, hundred years old, spectre of Russia's 
might still faces Europe from across the teeming graves 
of Russian people. This dreaded and strange appari- 
tion, bristling with bayonets, armed with chains, hung 
over with holy images ; that something not of this world, 
partaking of a ravenous ghoul, of a blind Djinn grown 
up from a cloud, and of the Old Man of the Sea, still 
faces us with its old stupidity, with its strange mystical 
arrogance, stamping its shadowy feet upon the grave- 
stone of autocracy, already cracked beyond repair by 
the torpedoes of Togo and the guns of Oyama, already 
heaving in the blood-soaked ground with the first stir- 
rings of a resurrection. 

Never before had the Western world the opportunity 
to look so deep into the black abyss which separates a 
soulless autocracy posing as, and even believing itself 
to be, the arbiter of Europe, from the benighted, starved 
souls of its people. This is the real object-lesson of this 
war, its unforgettable information. And this war's 
true mission, disengaged from the economic origins 
of that contest, from doors open or shut, from the fields 
of Korea for Russian wheat or Japanese rice, from the 
ownership of ice-free ports and the command of the 
waters of the East — its true mission was to lay a ghost. 
It has accomplished it. Whether Kuropatkin was in- 
capable or imlucky, whether or not Russia issuing next 



90 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

year, or the year after next, from behind a rampart of 
piled-up corpses will win or lose a fresh campaign, are 
minor considerations. The task of Japan is done, the 
mission accomplished; the ghost of Russia's might is 
laid. Only Europe, accustomed so long to the presence 
of that portent, seems unable to comprehend that, as in 
the fables of our childhood, the twelve strokes of the 
hour have rung, the cock has crowed, the apparition 
has vanished — never to haunt again this world which 
has been used to gaze at it with vague dread and many 
misgivings. 

It was a fascination. And the hallucination still 
lasts as inexplicable in its persistence as in its duration. 
It seems so unaccountable, that the doubt arises as to 
the sincerity of all that talk as to what Russia will or 
will not do, whether it will raise or not another army, 
whether it will bury the Japanese in Manchuria under 
seventy millions of sacrificed peasants' caps (as her 
Press boasted a little more than a year ago) or give up 
to Japan that jewel of her crown, Saghalien, together 
with some other things; whether, perchance, as an 
interesting alternative, it will make peace on the Amur 
in order to make war beyond the Oxus. 

All these speculations (with many others) have ap- 
peared gravely in print; and if they have been gravely 
considered by only one reader out of each hundred, 
there must be something subtly noxious to the human 
brain in the composition of newspaper ink; or else it is 
that the large page, the columns of words, the leaded 
headings, exalt the mind into a state of feverish credu- 
lity. The printed page of the Press makes a sort of 
still uproar, taking from men both the power to reflect 
and the faculty of genuine feeling; leaving them only 
the artificially created need of having something excit- f 
ing to talk about. 



AUTOCRACY AND WAR 91 

The truth is that the Russia of our fathers, of our 
childhood, of our middle-age; the testamentary Russia 
of Peter the Great — who imagined that all the nations 
were deHvered into the hand of Tsardom — can do noth- 
ing. It can do nothing because it does not exist. It 
has vanished for ever at last, and as yet there is no new 
Russia to take the place of that ill-omened creation, 
which, being a fantasy of a madman's brain, could in 
reality be nothing else than a figure out of a nightmare 
seated upon a monument of fear and oppression. 

The true greatness of a State does not spring from 
such a contemptible source. It is a matter of logical 
growth, of faith and courage. Its inspiration springs 
from the constructive instinct of the people, governed 
by the strong hand of a collective conscience and voiced 
in the wisdom and counsel of men who seldom reap the 
reward of gratitude. Many States have been powerful, 
but, perhaps, none have been truly great — as yet. 
That the position of a State in reference to the moral 
methods of its development can be seen only histori- 
cally, is true. Perhaps mankind has not lived long 
enough for a comprehensive view of any particular case. 
Perhaps no one will ever live long enough; and perhaps 
this earth shared out amongst our clashing ambitions 
by the anxious arrangements of statesmen will come 
to an end before we attain the felicity of greeting with 
unanimous applause the perfect fruition of a great 
State. It is even possible that we are destmed for 
another sort of bliss altogether: that sort which con- 
sists in being perpetually duped by false appearances. 
But whatever poHtical illusion the future may hold 
out to our fear or our admiration, there will be none, it 
is safe to say, which in the magnitude of anti-humani- 
tarian effect will equal that phantom now driven out of 
the world by the thunder of thousands of guns; none 



92 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

that in its retreat will cling with an equally shameless 
sincerity to more unworthy supports, to the moral cor- 
ruption and mental darkness of slavery, to the mere 
brute force of numbers. 

This very ignominy of infatuation should make clear 
to men's feelings and reason that the downfall of 
Russia's might is unavoidable. Spectral it lived and 
spectral it disappears without leaving a memory of a 
single generous deed, of a single service rendered — even 
involuntarily — to the polity of nations. Other des- 
potisms there have been, but none whose origin was 
so grimly fantastic in its baseness, and the beginning 
of whose end was so gruesomely ignoble. What is 
amazing is the myth of its irresistible strength which 
is dying so hard. 

4: :H 4: 4: 4: 

Considered historically, Russia's influence in Europe 
seems the most baseless thing in the world; a sort of 
convention invented by diplomatists for some dark pur- 
pose of their own, one would suspect, if the lack of grasp 
upon the realities of any given situation were not the 
main characteristic of the management of international 
relations. A glance back at the last hundred years 
shows the invariable, one may say the logical, power- 
lessness of Russia. As a military power it has never 
achieved by itself a single great thing. It has been 
indeed able to repel an ill-considered invasion, but only 
by having recourse to the extreme methods of despera- 
tion. In its attacks upon its specially selected victim 
this giant always struck as if with a withered right hand. 
All the campaigns against Turkey prove this, from 
Potemkin's time to the last Eastern war in 1878, entered 
upon with every advantage of a well-nursed prestige 
and a carefully fostered fanaticism. Even the half- 



AUTOCRACY AND WAR 93 

armed were always too much for the might of Russia, 
or, rather, of the Tsardom. It was victorious only 
against the practically disarmed, as, in regard to its 
ideal of territorial expansion, a glance at a map will 
prove sufficiently. As an ally, Russia has been always 
unprofitable, taking her share in the defeats rather than 
in the victories of her friends, but always pushing her 
own claims with the arrogance of an arbiter of military 
success. She has been unable to help to any purpose a 
single principle to hold its own, not even the principle of 
authority and legitimism which Nicholas the First had 
declared so haughtily to rest under his special protec- 
tion; just as Nicholas the Second has tried to make the 
maintenance of peace on earth his own exclusive affair. 
And the first Nicholas was a good Russian; he held the 
belief in the sacredness of his realm with such an inten- 
sity of faith that he could not survive the first shock of 
doubt. Rightly envisaged, the Crimean war was the 
end of what remained of absolutism and legitimism in 
Europe. It threw the way open for the liberation 
of Italy. The war in Manchuria makes an end of 
absolutism in Russia, whoever has got to perish 
from the shock behind a rampart of dead ukases, mani- 
festos, and rescripts. In the space of fifty years the 
self-appointed Apostle of Absolutism and the self- 
appointed Apostle of Peace, the Augustus and the 
Augustulus of the regime that was wont to speak 
contemptuously to European Foreign Offices in the 
beautiful French phrases of Prince Gorchakov, have 
fallen victims, each after his kind, to their shadowy and 
dreadful familiar, to the phantom, part ghoul, part 
Djinn, part Old Man of the Sea, with beak and claws 
and a double head, looking greedily both east and west 
on the confines of two continents. 

That nobody through all that time penetrated the 



94 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

true nature of the monster it is impossible to believe. 
But of the many who must have seen, all were either too 
modest, too cautious, perhaps too discreet, to speak; or 
else were too insignificant to be heard or believed. Yet 
not all. 

Tn the very early 'sixties. Prince Bismarck, then about 
to leave his post of Prussian Minister in St. Petersburg, 
called — so the story goes — upon another distinguished 
diplomatist. After some talk upon the general situ- 
ation, the future Chancellor of the German Empire 
remarked that it was his practice to resume the im- 
pressions he had carried out of every country where he 
had made a long stay, in a short sentence, which he 
caused to be engraved upon some trinket. "I am 
leaving this country now, and this is what I bring away 
from it," he continued, taking off his finger a new ring 
to show to his colleague the inscription inside: "La 
Russie, c^est le neant.^' 

Prince Bismarck had the truth of the matter and 
was neither too modest nor too discreet to speak out. 
Certainly he was not afraid of not being believed. Yet 
he did not shout his knowledge from the house-tops. 
He meant to have the phantom as his accomplice in an 
enterprise which has set the clock of peace back for 
many a year. 

He had his way. The German Empire has been an 
accomplished fact for more than the third of a century — 
a great and dreadful legacy left to the world by the ill- 
omened phantom of Russia's might. 

It is that phantom which is disappearing now — un- 
expectedly, astonishingly, as if by a touch of that won- 
derful magic for which the East has always been 
famous. The pretence of belief in its existence will 
no longer answer anybody's purposes (now Prince Bis- 
marck is dead) unless the purposes of the writers of 



AUTOCRACY AND WAR 95 

sensational paragraphs as to this Neant making an 
armed descent upon the plains of India. That sort of 
folly would be beneath notice if it did not distract at- 
tention from the real problem created for Europe by a 
war in the Far East. 

For good or evil in the working out of her destiny, 
Russia is bound to remain a Neant for many long years, 
in a more even than a Bismarckian sense. The very 
fear of this spectre being gone, it behoves us to con- 
sider its legacy — the fact (no phantom that) accom- 
plished in Central Europe by its help and connivance. 

The German Empire may feel at bottom the loss of 
an old accomplice always amenable to the confidential 
whispers of a bargain; but in the first instance it cannot 
but rejoice at the fundamental weakening of a possible 
obstacle to its instincts of territorial expansion. There 
is a removal of that latent feeling of restraint which the 
presence of a powerful neighbour, however implicated 
with you in a sense of common guilt, is bound to inspire. 
The common guilt of the two Empires is defined pre- 
cisely by their frontier line running through the Polish 
provinces. Without indulging in excessive feelings of 
indignation at that country's partition, or going so far 
as to believe — with a late French politician — in the 
"immanente justice des choses," it is clear that a 
material situation, based upon an essentially immoral 
transaction, contains the germ of fatal differences in 
the temperament of the two partners in iniquity — 
whatever the iniquity is. Germany has been the evil 
counsellor of Russia on all the questions of her Polish 
problem. Always urging the adoption of the most 
repressive measures with a perfectly logical duplicity. 
Prince Bismarck's Empire has taken care to couple 
the neighbourly offers of military assistance with 
merciless advice. The thought of the Polish provinces 



96 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

accepting a frank reconciliation with a humanised 
Russia and bringing the weight of homogeneous loyalty 
within a few miles of Berlin, has been always intensely 
distasteful to the arrogant Germanising tendencies of 
the other partner in iniquity. And, besides, the way 
to the Baltic provinces leads over the Niemen and over 
the Vistula. 

And now, when there is a possibility of serious 
internal disturbances destroying the sort of order 
autocracy has kept in Russia, the road over these rivers 
is seen wearing a more inviting aspect. At any moment 
the pretext of armed intervention may be found in a 
revolutionary outbreak provoked by Socialists, perhaps 
— but at any rate by the political immaturity of the 
enlightened classes and by the political barbarism of 
the Russian people. The throes of Russian resurrection 
will be long and painful. This is not the place to specu- 
late upon the nature of these convulsions, but there 
must be some violent break-up of the lamentable 
tradition, a shattering of the social, of the adminis- 
trative — certainly of the territorial — unity. 

Voices have been heard saying that the time for 
reforms in Russia is already past. This is the super- 
ficial view of the more profound truth that for Russia 
there has never been such a time within the memory 
of mankind. It is impossible to initiate a rational 
scheme of reform upon a phase of blind absolutism; 
and in Russia there has never been anything else to 
which the faintest tradition could, after ages of error, 
go back as to a parting of ways. 

In Europe the old monarchical principle stands justi- 
fied in its historical struggle with the growth of political 
liberty by the evolution of the idea of nationality as we 
see it concreted at the present time; by the inception 
of that wider solidarity grouping together around the 



II 



AUTOCRACY AND WAR 97 

standard of monarchical power these larger agglom- 
erations of mankind. This service of unification, creat- 
ing close-knit communities possessing the ability, the 
will, and the power to pursue a common ideal, has pre- 
pared the ground for the advent of a still larger un- 
derstanding: for the solidarity of Europeanism, which 
must be the next step towards the advent of Concord 
and Justice; an advent that, however delayed by the 
fatal worship of force and the errors of national selfish- 
ness, has been, and remains, the only possible goal of our 
progress. 

The conceptions of legality, of larger patriotism, 
of national duties and aspirations have grown under 
the shadow of the old monarchies of Europe, which 
were the creations of historical necessity. There were 
seeds of wisdom in their very mistakes and abuses. 
They had a past and a future; they were human. But 
under the shadow of Russian autocracy nothing could 
grow. Russian autocracy succeeded to nothing; it had 
no historical past, and it cannot hope for a historical 
future. It can only end. By no industry of in- 
vestigation, by no fantastic stretch of benevolence, can 
it be presented as a phase of development through 
which a Society, a State, must pass on the way to the 
full consciousness of its destiny. It lies outside the 
stream of progress. This despotism has been utterly 
un-European. Neither has it been Asiatic in its na- 
ture. Oriental despotisms belong to the history of 
mankind; they have left their trace on our minds and 
our imagination by their splendour, by their culture, by 
their art, by the exploits of great conquerors. The 
record of their rise and decay has an intellectual value; 
they are in their origins and their course the manifesta- 
tions of human needs, the instruments of racial tempera- 
ment, of catastrophic force, of faith and fanaticism. 



98 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

The Russian autocracy as we see it now is a thing apart. 
It is impossible to assign to it any rational origin in 
the vices, the misfortunes, the necessities, or the as- 
pirations of mankind. That despotism has neither an 
European nor an Oriental parentage; more, it seems to 
have no root either in the institutions or the follies of 
this earth. What strikes one with a sort of awe is just 
this something inhuman in its character. It is like a 
visitation, like a curse from Heaven falling in the dark- 
ness of ages upon the immense plains of forest and 
steppe lying dumbly on the confines of two continents: 
a true desert harbouring no Spirit either of the East or 
of the West. 

This pitiful fate of a country held by an evil spell, 
suffering from an awful visitation for which the re- 
sponsibility cannot be traced either to her sins or her 
follies, has made Russia as a nation so difficult to 
understand by Europe. From the very first ghastly 
dawn of her existence as a State she had to breathe the 
atmosphere of despotism; she found nothing but the 
arbitrary will of an obscure autocrat at the beginning 
and end of her organisation. Hence arises her im- 
penetrability to whatever is true in Western thought. 
Western thought, when it crosses her frontier, falls 
under the spell of her autocracy and becomes a noxious 
parody of itself. Hence the contradictions, the riddles 
of her national life, which are looked upon with such 
curiosity by the rest of the world. The curse had 
entered her very soul; autocracy, and nothing else in 
the world, has moulded her institutions, and with the 
poison of slavery drugged the national temperament 
into the apathy of a hopeless fatalism. It seems to 
have gone into the blood, tainting every mental activity 
in its source by a half-mystical, insensate, fascinating 
assertion of purity and holiness. The Government of 



AUTOCRACY AND WAR 99 

Holy Russia, arrogating to itself the supreme power to 
torment and slaughter the bodies of its subjects like a 
God-sent scourge, has been most cruel to those whom 
it allowed to live under the shadow of its dispensations. 
The worst crime against humanity of that system we 
behold now crouching at bay behind vast heaps of 
mangled corpses is the ruthless destruction of in- 
numerable minds. The greatest horror of the world — 
madness — walked faithfully in its train. Some of the 
best intellects of Russia, after struggling in vain against 
the spell, ended by throwing themselves at the feet 
of that hopeless despotism as a giddy man leaps into 
an abyss. An attentive survey of Russia's literature, 
of her Church, of her administration and the cross- 
currents of her thought, must end in the verdict that the 
Russia of to-day has not the right to give her voice on a 
single question touching the future of humanity, be- 
cause from the very inception of her being the brutal 
destruction of dignity, of truth, of rectitude, of all that 
is faithful in human nature has been made the im- 
perative condition of her existence. The great govern- 
mental secret of that imperium which Prince Bismarck 
had the insight and the courage to call Le Neant, has 
been the extirpation of every intellectual hope. To 
pronounce in the face of such a past the word Evolution, 
which is precisely the expression of the highest in- 
tellectual hope, is a gruesome pleasantry. There can 
be no evolution out of a grave. Another word of less 
scientific sound has been very much pronounced of late 
in connection with Russia's future, a word of more 
vague import; a word of dread as much as of hope — 
Revolution. 

In the face of the events of the last four months, this 
word has sprung instinctively, as it were, on grave lips, 
and has been heard with solemn forebodings. More or 



100 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

less consciously, Europe is preparing herself for a 
spectacle of much violence and perhaps of an inspiring 
nobility of greatness. And there will be nothing of 
what she expects. She will see neither the anticipated 
character of the violence, nor yet any signs of generous 
greatness. Her expectations, more or less vaguely 
expressed, give the measure of her ignorance of that 
Neant which for so many years had remained hidden 
behind this phantom of invincible armies. 

Neant I In a way, yes! And yet perhaps Prince 
Bismarck has let himself be led away by the seduction 
of a good phrase into the use of an inexact form. The 
^orm of his judgment had to be pithy, striking, en- 
graved within a ring. If he erred, then, no doubt he 
erred deliberately. The saying was near enough the 
truth to serve, and perhaps he did not want to destroy 
utterly by a more severe definition the prestige of the 
sham that could not deceive his genius. Prince Bis- 
marck has been really complimentary to the useful 
phantom of the autocratic might. There is an awe- 
inspiring idea of infinity conveyed in the word Neant — 
and in Russia there is no idea. She is not a Neant, she 
is and has been simply the negation of everything worth 
living for. She is not an empty void, she is a yawning 
chasm open between East and West; a bottomless abyss 
that has swallowed up every hope of mercy, every 
aspiration towards personal dignity, towards freedom, 
towards knowledge, every ennobling desire of the heart, 
every redeeming whisper of conscience. Those that 
have peered into that abyss, where the dreams of 
Panslavism, of universal conquest, mingled with the 
hate and contempt for Western ideas, drift impo- 
tently like shapes of mist, know well that it is bottom- 
less; that there is in it no ground for anything that 
could in the remotest degree serve even the lowest 



AUTOCRACY AND WAR 101 

interests of mankind — and certainly no ground ready 
for a revolution. The sin of the old European mon- 
archies was not the absolutism inherent in every form 
of government; it was the inability to alter the forms of 
their legality, grown narrow and oppressive with the 
march of time. Every form of legality is bound to 
degenerate into oppression, and the legality in the forms 
of monarchical institutions sooner, perhaps, than any 
other. It has not been the business of monarchies to be 
adaptive from within. With the mission of uniting 
and consolidating the particular ambitions and in- 
terests of feudalism in favour of a larger conception 
of a State, of giving self -consciousness, force and 
nationality to the scattered energies of thought and 
action, they were fated to lag behind the march of ideas 
they had themselves set in motion in a direction they 
could neither understand nor approve. Yet, for all 
that, the thrones still remain, and what is more signifi- 
cant, perhaps, some of the dynasties, too, have sur- 
vived. The revolutions of European States have never 
been in the nature of absolute protests en masse against 
the monarchical principle; they were the uprising of 
the people against the oppressive degeneration of 
legality. But there never has been any legality in 
Russia; she is a negation of that as of everything else 
that has its root in reason or conscience. The ground 
of every revolution had to be intellectually prepared. 
A revolution is a short cut in the rational development 
of national needs in response to the growth of world- 
wide ideals. It is conceivably possible for a monarch 
of genius to put himself at the head of a revolution with- 
out ceasing to be the king of his people. For the autoc- 
racy of Holy Russia the only conceivable self-reform 
is — suicide. 

The same relentless fate holds in its grip the all- 



102 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

powerful ruler and his helpless people. Wielders of a 
power purchased by an unspeakable baseness of sub- 
jection to the Khans of the Tartar horde, the Princes 
of Russia who, in their heart of hearts had come in time 
to regard themselves as superior to every monarch of 
Europe, have never risen to be the chiefs of a nation. 
Their authority has never been sanctioned by popular 
tradition, by ideas of intelligent loyalty, of devotion, of 
political necessity, of simple expediency, or even by the 
power of the sword. In whatever form of upheaval Au- 
tocratic Russia is to find her end, it can never be a revo- 
lution fruitful of moral consequences to mankind. It 
cannot be anything else but a rising of slaves. It is a 
tragic circumstance that the only thing one can wish to 
that people who had never seen face to face either law, 
order, justice, right, truth about itself or the rest of the 
world; who had known nothing outside the capricious 
will of its irresponsible masters, is that it should find in 
the approaching hour of need, not an organiser or a law- 
giver, with the wisdom of a Lycurgus or a Solon for their 
service, but at least the force of energy and desperation 
in some as yet unknown Spartacus. 

A brand of hopeless mental and moral inferiority is 
set upon Russian achievements; and the coming events 
of her internal changes, however appalling they may be 
in their magnitude, will be nothing more impressive 
than the convulsions of a colossal body. As her boasted 
military force that, corrupt in its origin, has ever struck 
no other but faltering blows, so her soul, kept benumbed 
by her temporal and spiritual master with the poison of 
tyranny and superstition, will find itself on awakening 
possessed of no language, a monstrous full-grown child 
having first to learn the ways of living thought and 
articulate speech. It is safe to say tyranny, assuming 
a thousand protean shapes, will remain clinging to her 



II 



AUTOCRACY AND WAR 103 

struggles for a long time before her blind multitudes 
succeed at last in trampling her out of existence under 
their millions of bare feet. 

That would be the beginning. What is to come 
after .f^ The conquest of freedom to call your soul your 
own is only the first step on the road to excellence. 
We, in Europe, have gone a step or two further, have 
had the time to forget how little that freedom means. 
To Russia it must seem everything. A prisoner shut 
up in a noisome dungeon concentrates all his hope and 
desire on the moment of stepping out beyond the gates. 
It appears to him pregnant with an immense and final 
importance; whereas what is important is the spirit in 
which he will draw the first breath of freedom, the 
counsels he will hear, the hands he may find extended, 
the endless days of toil that must follow, wherein he 
will have to build his future with no other material but 
what he can find within himself. 

It would be vain for Russia to hope for the support 
and counsel of collective wisdom. Since 1870 (as a 
distinguished statesman of the old tradition disconso- 
lately exclaimed) "i7 n'y a plus d' Europe!'' There 
is, indeed, no Europe. The idea of a Europe united in 
the solidarity of her dynasties, which for a moment 
seemed to dawn on the horizon of the Vienna Congress 
through the subsiding dust of Napoleonic alarums and 
excursions, has been extinguished by the larger glamour 
of less restraining ideals. Instead of the doctrines of 
solidarity it was the doctrine of nationalities much 
more favourable to spoliations that came to the front, 
and since its greatest triumphs at Sadowa and Sedan 
there is no Europe. Meanwhile till the time comes 
when there will be no frontiers, there are alliances so 
shamelessly based upon the exigencies of suspicion and 
mistrust that their cohesive force waxes and wanes with 



104 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

every year, almost with the event of every passing 
month. This is the atmosphere Russia will find when 
the last rampart of tyranny has been beaten down. 
But what hands, what voices will she find on coming 
out into the light of day? An ally she has yet who 
more than any other of Russia's allies has found that 
it had parted with lots of solid substance in exchange 
for a shadow. It is true that the shadow was indeed 
the mightiest, the darkest that the modern world had 
ever known — and the most overbearing. But it is 
fading now, and the tone of truest anxiety as to what 
is to take its place will come, no doubt, from that and 
no other direction, and no doubt, also, it will have that 
note of generosity which even in the moments of great- 
est aberration is seldom wanting in the voice of the 
French people. 

Two neighbours Russia will find at her door. Aus- 
tria, traditionally unaggressive whenever her hand is not 
forced, ruled by a dynasty of uncertain future, weakened 
by her duality, can only speak to her in an uncertain, 
bi-lingual phrase. Prussia, grown in something like 
forty years from an almost pitiful dependant into a 
bullying friend and evil counsellor of Russia's masters, 
may, indeed, hasten to extend a strong hand to the 
weakness of her exhausted body, but if so it will be only 
with the intention of tearing away the long-coveted 
part of her substance. 

Pan-Germanism is by no means a shape of mists, and 
Germany is anything but a Neant where thought and 
effort are likely to lose themselves without sound or 
trace. It is a powerful and voracious organisation, full 
of unscrupulous self-confidence, whose appetite for 
aggrandisement will only be limited by the power of 
helping itself to the severed members of its friends and 
neighbours. The era of wars so eloquently denounced 



AUTOCRACY AND WAR 105 

by the old Republicans as the peculiar blood guilt of 
dynastic ambitions is by no means over yet. They will 
be fought out differently, with lesser frequency, with an 
increased bitterness and the savage tooth-and-claw 
obstinacy of a struggle for existence. They will make 
us regret the time of dynastic ambitions, with their 
human absurdity moderated by prudence and even by 
shame, by the fear of personal responsibility and the 
regard paid to certain forms of conventional decency. 
For, if the monarchs of Europe have been derided for 
addressing each other as "brother" in autograph com- 
munications, that relationship was at least as effective 
as any form of brotherhood likely to be established be- 
tween the rival nations of this continent, which, we are 
assured on all hands, is the heritage of democracy. In 
the ceremonial brotherhood of monarchs the reality 
of blood-ties, for what little it is worth, acted often as 
a drag on unscrupulous desires of glory or greed. Be- 
sides, there was always the common danger of exas- 
perated peoples, and some respect for each other's 
divine right. No leader of a democracy, without other 
ancestry but the sudden shout of a multitude, and de- 
barred by the very condition of his power from even 
thinking of a direct heir, will have any interest in calling 
brother the leader of another democracy — a chief as 
fatherless and heirless as himself. 

The war of 1870, brought about by the third Napo- 
leon's half-generous, half-selfish adoption of the prin- 
ciple of nationalities, was the first war characterised by 
a special intensity of hate, by a new note in the tune 
of an old song for which we may thank the Teutonic 
thoroughness. Was it not that excellent bourgeoise, 
Princess Bismarck (to keep only to great examples), 
who was so righteously anxious to see men, women, and 
children — emphatically the children, too — of the abomi- 



106 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

nable French nation massacred off the face of the earth? 
This illustration of the hew war-temper is artlessly 
revealed in the prattle of the amiable Busch, the 
Chancellor's pet "reptile" of the Press. And this was 
supposed to be a war for an idea ! Too much, however, 
should not be made of that good wife's and mother's 
sentiments any more than of the good First Emperor 
William's tears, shed so abundantly after every battle, 
by letter, telegram, and otherwise, during the course 
of the same war, before a dumb and shamefaced conti- 
nent. These were merely the expressions of the sim- 
plicity of a nation which more than any other has a 
tendency to run into the grotesque. There is worse 
to come. 

To-day, in the fierce grapple of two nations of dif- 
ferent race, the short era of national wars seems about 
to close. No war will be waged for an idea. The 
"noxious idle aristocracies" of yesterday fought with- 
out malice for an occupation, for the honour, for the fun 
of the thing. The virtuous, industrious democratic 
States of to-morrow may yet be reduced to fighting 
for a crust of dry bread, with all the hate, ferocity, and 
fury that must attach to the vital importance of such 
an issue. The dreams sanguine humanitarians raised 
almost to ecstasy about the year 'fifty of the last 
century by the moving sight of the Crystal Palace — 
crammed full with that variegated rubbish which it 
seems to be the bizarre fate of humanity to produce for 
the benefit of a few employers of labour — have vanished 
as quickly as they had arisen. The golden hopes of 
peace have in a single night turned to dead leaves in 
every drawer of every benevolent theorist's writing 
table. A swift disenchantment overtook the incredible 
infatuation which could put its trust in the peaceful 
nature of industrial and commercial competition. 



AUTOCRACY AND WAR 107 

Industrialism and commercialism — wearing high- 
sounding names in many languages {Welt-politik may 
serve for one instance) picking up coins behind the 
severe and disdainful figure of science whose giant 
strides have widened for us the horizon of the universe 
by some few inches — stand ready, almost eager, to 
appeal to the sword as soon as the globe of the earth has 
shrunk beneath our growing numbers by another ell or 
so. And democracy, which has elected to pin its faith 
to the supremacy of material interests, will have to 
fight their battles to the bitter end, on a mere pittance — 
unless, indeed, some statesman of exceptional ability and 
overwhelming prestige succeeds in carrying through 
an international understanding for the delimitation of 
spheres of trade all over the earth, on the model of the 
territorial spheres of influence marked in Africa to keep 
the competitors for the privilege of improving the 
nigger (as a buying machine) from flying prematurely 
at each other's throats. 

This seems the only expedient at hand for the 
temporary maintenance of European peace, with its 
alliances based on mutual distrust, preparedness for war 
as its ideal, and the fear of wounds, luckily stronger, so 
far, than the pinch of hunger, its only guarantee. The 
true p>eace of the world will be a place of refuge much 
less like a beleaguered fortress and more, let us hope, 
in the nature of an Inviolable Temple. It will be built 
on less perishable foundations than those of material 
interests. But it must be confessed that the archi- 
tectural aspect of the universal city remains as yet in- 
conceivable — that the very ground lor its erection has 
not been cleared of the jungle. 

Never before in history has the right of war been 
more fully admitted in the rounded periods of public 
speeches, in books, in public prints, in all the pubhc 



108 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

works of peace, culminating in the establishment of the 
Hague Tribunal — that solemnly official recognition of 
the Earth as a House of Strife. To him whose indig- 
nation is qualified by a measure of hope and affection, 
the efforts of mankind to work its own salvation present 
a sight of alarming comicality. After clinging for ages 
to the steps of the heavenly throne, they are now, with- 
out much modifying their attitude, trying with touching 
ingenuity to steal one by one the thunderbolts of their 
Jupiter. They have removed war from the list of 
Heaven-sent visitations that could only be prayed 
against; they have erased its name from the supplication 
against the wrath of war, pestilence, and famine, as it is 
found in the litanies of the Roman Catholic Church; 
they have dragged the scourge down from the skies and 
have made it into a calm and regulated institution. At 
first sight the change does not seem for the better. 
Jove's thunderbolt looks a most dangerous plaything 
in the hands of the people. But a solemnly established 
institution begins to grow old at once in the discussion, 
abuse, worship, and execration of men. It grows ob- 
solete, odious, and intolerable; it stands fatally con- 
demned to an unhonoured old age. 

Therein lies the best hope of advanced thought, and 
the best way to help its prospects is to provide in the 
fullest, frankest way for the conditions of the present 
day. War is one of its conditions; it is its principal 
condition. It lies at the heart of every question 
agitating the fears and hopes of a humanity divided 
against itself. The succeeding ages have changed 
nothing except the watchwords of the armies. The 
intellectual stage of mankind being as yet in its infancy, 
and States, like most individuals, having but a feeble 
and imperfect consciousness of the worth and force of 
the inner life, the need of making their existence mani- 



AUTOCRACY AND WAR 109 

fest to themselves is determined in the direction of 
physical activity. The idea of ceasing to grow in 
territory, in strength, in wealth, in influence — in any- 
thing but wisdom and self-knowledge is odious to them 
as the omen of the end. Action, in which is to be found 
the illusion of a mastered destiny, can alone satisfy our 
uneasy vanity and lay to rest the haunting fear of the 
future — a sentiment concealed, indeed, but proving its 
existence by the force it has, when invoked, to stir the 
passions of a nation. It will be long before we have 
learned that in the great darkness before us there is 
nothing that we need fear. Let us act lest we perish — 
is the cry. And the only form of action open to a State 
can be of no other than aggressive nature. 

There are many kinds of aggressions, though the 
sanction of them is one and the same — the magazine 
rifle of the latest pattern. In preparation for or against 
that form of action the States of Europe are spending 
now such moments of uneasy leisure as they can snatch 
from the labours of factory and counting-house. 

Never before has war received so much homage at 
the lips of men, and reigned with less disputed sway 
in their minds. It has harnessed science to its gun- 
carriages, it has enriched a few respectable manu- 
facturers, scattered doles of food and raiment amongst 
a few thousand skilled workmen, devoured the first 
youth of whole generations, and reaped its harvest of 
countless corpses. It has perverted the intelligence of 
men, women, and children, and has made the speeches 
of Emperors, Kings, Presidents, and Ministers monoto- 
nous with ardent protestations of fidelity to peace. 
Indeed, war has made peace altogether its own, it has 
modelled it on its own image: a martial, overbearing, 
war-lord sort of peace, with a mailed fist, and turned- 
up moustaches, ringing with the din of grand manoeu- 



110 NOTES ON LITE AND LETTERS 

vres, eloquent with allusions to glorious feats of arms; it 
has made peace so magnificent as to be almost as ex- 
pensive to keep up as itself. It has sent out apostles 
of its own, who at one time went about (mostly in 
newspapers) preaching the gospel of the mystic sanc- 
tity of its sacrifices, and the regenerating power of spilt 
blood, to the poor in mind — whose name is legion. 

It has been observed that in the course of earthly 
greatness a day of culminating triumph is often paid for 
by a morrow of sudden extinction. Let us hope it is 
so. Yet the dawn of that day of retribution may be a 
long time breaking above a dark horizon. War is with 
us now; and, whether this one ends soon or late, war 
will be with us again. And it is the way of true wisdom 
for men and States to take account of things as they 
are. 

Civilization has done its little best by our sensibilities 
for whose growth it is responsible. It has managed to 
remove the sights and sounds of battlefields away from 
our doorsteps. But it cannot be expected to achieve 
the feat always and under every variety of circum- 
stance. Some day it must fail, and we shall have then 
a wealth of appallingly unpleasant sensations brought 
home to us with painful intimacy. It is not absurd 
to suppose that whatever war comes to us next it will 
not be a distant war waged by Russia either beyond 
the Amur or beyond the Oxus. 

The Japanese armies have laid that ghost for ever, 
because the Russia of the future will not, for the rea- 
sons explained above, be the Russia of to-day. It will 
not have the same thoughts, resentments and aims. It 
is even a question whether it will preserve its gigantic 
frame unaltered and unbroken. All speculation loses 
itself in the magnitude of the events made possible by 
the defeat of an autocracy whose only shadow of a title 



AUTOCRACY AND WAR 111 

to existence was the invincible power of military con- 
quest. That autocratic Russia will have a miserable 
end in harmony with its base origin and inglorious life 
does not seem open to doubt. The problem of the im- 
mediate future is posed not by the eventual manner 
but by the approaching fact of its disappearance. 

The Japanese armies, in laying the oppressive ghost, 
have not only accomplished what will be recognized 
historically as an important mission in the world's 
struggle against all forms of evil, but have also created 
a situation. They have created a situation in the East 
which they are competent to manage by themselves; 
and in doing this they have brought about a change in 
the condition of the West with which Europe is not well 
prepared to deal. The common ground of concord, 
good faith and justice is not sufficient to establish an 
action upon; since the conscience of but very few men 
amongst us, and of no single Western nation as yet, 
will brook the restraint of abstract ideas as against the 
fascination of a material advantage. And eagle-eyed 
wisdom alone cannot take the lead of human action, 
which in its nature must for ever remain short-sighted. 
The trouble of the civilised world is the want of a com- 
mon conservative principle abstract enough to give the 
impulse, practical enough to form the rallying point of 
international action tending towards the restraint of 
particular ambitions. Peace tribunals instituted for 
the greater glory of war will not replace it. TVTiether 
such a principle exists — who can say.^ If it does not, 
then it ought to be invented. A sage with a sense of 
humour and a heart of compassion should set about it 
without loss of time, and a solemn prophet full of words 
and fire ought to be given the task of preparing the 
minds. So far there is no trace of such a principle any- 
where in sight; even its plausible imitations (never very 



in NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS \ 

effective) have disappeared long ago before the doctrine 
of national aspirations. II rCy a plus d' Europe — there 
is only an armed and trading continent, the home of 
slowly maturing economical contests for life and death, 
and of loudly proclaimed world-wide ambitions. There 
are also other ambitions not so loud, but deeply rooted 
in the envious acquisitive temperament of the last 
comer amongst the great Powers of the Continent, 
whose feet are not exactly in the ocean — not yet — and 
whose head is very high up — in Pomerania, the breeding 
place of such precious Grenadiers that Prince Bismarck 
(whom it is a pleasure to quote) would not have given 
the bones of one of them for the settlement of the old 
Eastern Question. But times have changed, since, by 
way of keeping up, I suppose, some old barbaric Ger- 
man rite, the faithful servant of the Hohenzollerns was 
buried alive to celebrate the accession of a new Emperor. 
Already the voice of surmises has been heard hinting 
tentatively at a possible re-grouping of European 
Powers. The alliance of the three Empires is supposed 
possible. And it may be possible. The myth of 
Russia's power is dying very hard — hard enough for 
that combination to take place — such is the fascination 
that a discredited show of numbers will still exercise 
upon the imagination of a people trained to the wor- 
ship of force. Germany may be willing to lend its 
support to a tottering autocracy for the sake of an 
undisputed first place and of a preponderating voice 
in the settlement of every question in that south- 
east of Europe which merges into Asia. No prin- 
ciple being involved in such an alliance of mere ex- 
pediency, it would never be allowed to stand in the 
way of Germany's other ambitions. The fall of au- 
tocracy would bring its restraint automatically to an 
end. Thus it may be believed that the support Russian 



AUTOCRACY AND WAR 113 

despotism may get from its once humble friend and 
client will not be stamped by that thoroughness which 
is supposed to be the mark of German superiority. 
Russia weakened down to the second place, or Russia 
eclipsed altogether during the throes of her regenera- 
tion, will answer equally well the plans of German 
policy — which are many and various and often in- 
credible, though the aim of them all is the same: 
aggrandisement of territory and influence, with no 
regard to right and justice, either in the East or in the 
West. For that and no other is the true note of your 
Welt-politik which desires to live. 

The German eagle with a Prussian head looks all 
round the horizon not so much for something to do that 
would count for good in the records of the earth, as 
simply for something good to get. He gazes upon the 
land and upon the sea with the same covetous steadi- 
ness, for he has become of late a maritime eagle, and 
has learned to box the compass. He gazes north and 
south, and east and west, and is inclined to look in- 
temperately upon the waters of the Mediterranean 
when they are blue. The disappearance of the Russian 
phantom has given a foreboding of unwonted freedom 
to the Welt-politik. According to the national tendency 
this assumption of Imperial impulses would run into 
the grotesque were it not for the spikes of the pickel- 
haubes peeping out grimly from behind. Germany's 
attitude proves that no peace for the earth can be found 
in the expansion of material interests which she seems 
to have adopted exclusively as her only aim, ideal, and 
watchword. For the use of those who gaze half-un- 
believing at the passing away of the Russian phantom, 
part Ghoul, part Djinn, part Old Man of the Sea, and 
wait half-doubting for the birth of a nation's soul in 
this age which knows no miracles, the once-famous say- 



114 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

ing of poor Gambetta, tribune of the people (who was 
simple and believed in the "immanent justice of 
things") may be adapted in the shape of a warning 
that, so far as a future of liberty, concord, and justice is 
concerned: *'Le Prussianisme — voila Vennemi!^* 



THE CRIME OF PARTITION 

1919 

At the end of the eighteenth century when the 
partition of Poland had become an accompHshed fact 
the world qualified it at once as a crime. This strong 
condemnation proceeded, of course, from the West of 
Europe; the Powers of the centre, Prussia and Austria, 
were not likely to admit that this spoliation fell into 
the category of acts morally reprehensible and carrying 
the taint of anti-social guilt. As to Russia, the third 
party to the crime, and the originator of the scheme, she 
had no national conscience at the time. The will of its 
rulers was always accepted by the people as the ex- 
pression of an omnipotence derived directly from God. 
As an act of mere conquest the best excuse for the 
partition lay simply in the fact that it happened to 
be possible; there was the plunder and there was the 
opportunity to get hold of it. Catherine the Great 
looked upon this extension of her dominions with a 
cynical satisfaction. Her political argument that the de- 
struction of Poland meant the repression of revolution- 
ary ideas and the checking of the spread of Jacobinism 
in Europe was a characteristically impudent pretence. 
There may have been minds here and there amongst the 
Russians that perceived, or perhaps only felt, that by 
the annexation of the greater part of the Polish Re- 
public, Russia approached nearer to the comity of civil- 
ised nations and ceased, at least territorially, to be an 
Asiatic Power. 

115 



116 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

It was only after the partition of Poland that Russia 
began to play a great part in Europe. To such states- 
men as she had then that act of brigandage must have 
appeared inspired by great political wisdom. The 
King of Prussia, faithful to the ruling principle of his 
life, wished simply to aggrandise his dominions at a 
much smaller cost and at much less risk than he could 
have done in any other direction; for at that time Po- 
land was perfectly defenceless from a material point of 
view, and more than ever, perhaps, inclined to put its 
faith in humanitarian illusions. Morally, the Re- 
public was in a state of ferment and consequent weak- 
ness, which so often accompanies the period of social 
reform. The strength arrayed against her was just then 
overwhelming; I mean the comparatively honest (be- 
cause open) strength of armed forces. But, probably 
from innate inclination towards treachery, Frederick 
of Prussia selected for himself the part of falsehood and 
deception. Appearing on the scene in the character of 
a friend he entered deliberately into a treaty of alliance 
with the Republic, and then, before the ink was dry, 
tore it up in brazen defiance of the commonest decency, 
which must have been extremely gratifying to his nat- 
ural tastes. 

As to Austria, it shed diplomatic tears over the trans- 
action. They can not be called crocodile tears, inso- 
much that they were in a measure sincere. They arose 
from a vivid perception that Austria's allotted share of 
the spoil could never compensate her for the accession 
of strength and territory to the other two Powers. 
Austria did not really want an extension of territory at 
the cost of Poland. She could not hope to improve her 
frontier in that way, and economically she had no need 
of Galicia, a province whose natural resources were 
undeveloped and whose salt mines did not arouse her 






THE CRIME OF PARTITION 117 

cupidity because she had salt mines of her own. No 
doubt the democratic complexion of Polish institutions 
was very distasteful to the conservative monarchy; 
Austrian statesmen did see at the time that the real 
danger to the principle of autocracy was in the West, in 
France, and that all the forces of Central Europe would 
be needed for its suppression. But the movement 
towards a partage on the part of Russia and Prussia was 
too definite to be resisted, and Austria had to follow 
their lead in the destruction of a State which she would 
have preferred to preserve as a possible ally against 
Prussian and Russian ambitions. It may be truly said 
that the destruction of Poland secured the safety of the 
French Revolution. For when in 1795 the crime was 
consummated, the Revolution had turned the corner 
and was in a state to defend itself against the forces of 
reaction. 

In the second half of the eighteenth century there 
were two centres of liberal ideas on the continent of 
Europe: France and Poland. On an impartial sur- 
vey one may say without exaggeration that then France 
was relatively every bit as weak as Poland; even, per- 
haps, more so. But France's geographical position 
made her much less vulnerable. She had no powerful 
neighbours on her frontier; a decayed Spain in the south 
and a conglomeration of small German Principalities on 
the east were her happy lot. The only States which 
dreaded the contamination of the new principles and had 
enough power to combat it were Prussia, Austria, and 
Russia, and they had another centre of forbidden ideas to 
deal with in defenceless Poland, unprotected by nature, 
and offering an immediate satisfaction to their cupidity. 
They made their choice, and the untold sufferings of a 
nation which would not die was the price exacted by 
fate for the triumph of revolutionary ideals. 



118 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

Thus even a crime may become a moral agent by the 
lapse of time and the course of history. Progress leaves 
its dead by the way, for progress is only a great ad- 
venture as its leaders and chiefs know very well in their 
hearts. It is a march into an undiscovered country; 
and in such an enterprise the victims do not count. 
As an emotional outlet for the oratory of freedom it was 
convenient enough to remember the Crime now and 
then: the Crime being the murder of a State and the 
carving of its body into three pieces. There was really 
nothing to do but to drop a few tears and a few flowers 
of rhetoric upon the grave. But the spirit of the nation 
refused to rest therein. It haunted the territories of 
the Old Republic in the manner of a ghost haunting its 
ancestral mansion where strangers are making them- 
selves at home; a calumniated, ridiculed, and pooh- 
pooh'd ghost, and yet never ceasing to inspire a sort 
of awe, a strange uneasiness, in the hearts of the im- 
lawful possessors. Poland deprived of its indepen- 
dence, of its historical continuity, with its religion 
and language persecuted and repressed, became a mere 
geographical expression. And even that, itself, seemed 
strangely vague, had lost its definite character, was 
rendered doubtful by the theories and the claims of the 
spoliators who, by a strange effect of uneasy conscience, 
while strenuously denying the moral guilt of the trans- 
action, were always trying to throw a veil of high recti- 
tude over the Crime. What was most annoying to 
their righteousness was the fact that the nation, stabbed 
to the heart, refused to grow insensible and cold. That 
persistent and almost uncanny vitality was sometimes 
very inconvenient to the rest of Europe also. It would 
intrude its irresistible claim into every problem of 
European politics, into the theory of European equi- 
librium, into the question of the Near East, the Italian 



THE CRIME OF PARTITION 119 

question, the question of Schleswig-Holstein, and into 
the doctrine of nationahties. That ghost, not content 
with making its ancestral halls uncomfortable for the 
thieves, haunted also the Cabinets of Europe, waved 
indecently its bloodstained robes in the solemn at- 
mosphere of Council-rooms, where congresses and con- 
ferences sit with closed windows. It would not be 
exorcised by the brutal jeers of Bismarck and the fine 
railleries of Gorchakov. As a Polish friend observed 
to me some years ago: "Till the year '48 the Pohsh 
problem has been to a certain extent a convenient 
rally ing-point for all manifestations of liberalism. 
Since that time we have come to be regarded simply as a 
nuisance. It's very disagreeable." 

I agreed that it was, and he continued: "What are 
we to do.'^ We did not create the situation by any out- 
side action of ours. Through all the centuries of its 
existence Poland has never been a menace to anybody, 
not even to the Turks, to whom it has been merely an 
obstacle." 

Nothing could be more true. The spirit of aggressive- 
ness was absolutely foreign to the Polish temperament, 
to which the preservation of its institutions and its 
liberties was much more precious than any ideas of con- 
quest. Polish wars were defensive, and they were 
mostly fought within Poland's own borders. And that 
those territories were often invaded was but a mis- 
fortune arising from its geographical position. Terri- 
torial expansion was never the master-thought of 
Polish statesmen. The consolidation of the territories 
of the serenissime Republic, which made of it a Power 
of the first rank for a time, was not accomplished by 
force. It was not the consequence of successful aggres- 
sion, but of a long and successful defence against the 
raiding neighbours from the East. The lands of 



120 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

Lithuanian and Ruthenian speech were never con- 
quered by Poland. These peoples were not compelled 
by a series of exhausting wars to seek safety in annex- 
ation. It was not the will of a prince or a political 
intrigue that brought about the union. Neither was it 
fear. The slowly-matured view of the economical and 
social necessities and, before all, the ripening moral 
sense of the masses were the motives that induced the 
forty-three representatives of Lithuanian and Ru- 
thenian provinces, led by their paramount prince, to 
enter into a political combination unique in the history 
of the world, a spontaneous and complete union of 
sovereign States choosing deliberately the way of peace. 
Never was strict truth better expressed in a political 
instrument than in the preamble of the first Union 
Treaty (1413). It begins with the words: "This Union, 
being the outcome not of hatred, but of love" — words 
that Poles have not heard addressed to them politically 
by any nation for the last one hundred and fifty years. 
This union being an organic, living thing capable of 
growth and development was, later, modified and con- 
firmed by two other treaties, which guaranteed to all 
the parties in a just and eternal union all their rights, 
liberties, and respective institutions. The Polish State 
offers a singular instance of an extremely liberal ad- 
ministrative federalism which, in its Parliamentary life 
as well as its international politics, presented a complete 
unity of feeling and purpose. As an eminent French 
diplomatist remarked many years ago: "It is a very 
remarkable fact in the history of the Polish State, this 
invariable and unanimous consent of the populations; 
the more so that, the King being looked upon simply 
as the chief of the Republic, there was no monarchical 
bond, no dynastic fidelity to control and guide the 
sentiment of the nations, and their union remained as a 



THE CRIME OF PARTITION 121 

pure affirmation of the national will." The Grand 
Duchy of Lithuania and its Ruthenian Provinces re- 
tained their statutes, their own administration, and 
their own political institutions. That those institu- 
tions in the course of time tended to assimilation 
with the Polish fortn was not the result of any pres- 
sure, but simply of the superior character of Polish 
civilisation. 

Even after Poland lost its independence this alliance 
and this union remained firm in spirit and fidelity. All 
the national movements towards liberation were 
initiated in the name of the whole mass of people in- 
habiting the limits of the Old Republic, and all the 
Provinces took part in them with complete devotion. 
It is only in the last generation that efforts have been 
made to create a tendency towards separation, which 
would indeed serve no one but Poland's common ene- 
mies. And, strangely enough, it is the internationalists, 
men who professedly care nothing for race or country, 
who have set themselves this task of disruption, one can 
easily see for what sinister purpose. The ways of the 
internationalists may be dark, but they are not in- 
scrutable. 

From the same source no doubt there will flow in the 
future a poisoned stream of hints of a reconstituted 
Poland being a danger to the races once so closely 
associated within the territories of the Old Republic. 
The old partners in "the Crime" are not likely to for- 
give their victim its inconvenient and almost shocking 
obstinacy in keeping alive. They had tried moral 
assassination before and with some small measure 
of success, for, indeed, the Polish question, like all 
living reproaches, had become a nuisance. Given the 
wrong, and the apparent impossibility of righting it 
without running risks of a serious nature, some moral 



122 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

alleviation may be found in the belief that the victim 
had brought its misfortunes on its own head by its own 
sins. That theory, too, had been advanced about 
Poland (as if other nations had known nothing of sin 
and folly), and it made some way in the world at dif- 
ferent times, simply because good care was taken by the 
interested parties to stop the mouth of the accused. 
But it has never carried much conviction to honest 
minds. Somehow, in defiance of the cynical point of 
view as to the Force of Lies and against all the power of 
falsified evidence, truth often turns out to be stronger 
than calumny. With the course of years, however, 
another danger sprang up, a danger arising naturally 
from the new political alliances dividing Europe into 
two armed camps. It was the danger of silence. Al- 
most without exception the Press of Western Europe 
in the twentieth century refused to touch the Polish 
question in any shape or form whatever. Never was 
the fact of Polish vitality more embarrassing to 
European diplomacy than on the eve of Poland's 
resurrection. 

When the war broke out there was something grue- 
somely comic in the proclamations of emperors and 
archdukes appealing to that invincible soul of a nation 
whose existence or moral worth they had been so arro- 
gantly denying for more than a century. Perhaps in 
the whole record of human transactions there have never 
been performances so brazen and so vile as the mani- 
festoes of the German Emperor and the Grand Duke 
Nicholas of Russia; and, I imagine, no more bitter insult 
has been offered to human heart and intelligence than 
the way in which those proclamations were flung into 
the face of historical truth. It was like a scene in a 
cynical and sinister farce, the absurdity of which be- 
came in some sort unfathomable by the reflection that 



THE CRIME OF PARTITION 123 

nobody in the world could possibly be so abjectly stupid 
as to be deceived for a single moment. At that time, 
and for the first two months of the war, I happened 
to be in Poland, and I remember perfectly well that, 
when those precious documents came out, the confi- 
dence in the moral turpitude of mankind they implied 
did not even raise a scornful smile on the lips of men 
whose most sacred feelings and dignity they outraged. 
They did not deign to waste their contempt on them. 
In fact, the situation was too poignant and too involved 
for either hot scorn or a coldly rational discussion. 
For the Poles it was like being in a burning house of 
which all the issues were locked. There was nothing 
but sheer anguish under the strange, as if stony, calm- 
ness which in the utter absence of all hope falls on 
minds that are not constitutionally prone to despair. 
Yet in this time of dismay the irrepressible vitality of 
the nation would not accept a neutral attitude. I was 
told that even if there were no issue it was absolutely 
necessary for the Poles to affirm their national existence. 
Passivity, which could be regarded as a craven accept- 
ance of all the material and moral horrors ready to fall 
upon the nation, was not to be thought of for a moment. 
Therefore, it was explained to me, the Poles must act. 
Whether this was a counsel of wisdom or not it is very 
difficult to say, but there are crises of the soul which 
are beyond the reach of wisdom. When there is 
apparently no issue visible to the eyes of reason, senti- 
ment may yet find a way out, either towards salvation 
or to utter perdition, no one can tell — and the senti- 
ment does not even ask the question. Being there as 
a stranger in that tense atmosphere, which was yet not 
unfamiliar to me, I was not very anxious to parade my 
wisdom, especially after it had been pointed out in 
answer to my cautious arguments that, if life has its 



124 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

values worth fighting for, death, too, has that in it 
which can make it worthy or unworthy. 

Out of the mental and moral trouble into which the 
grouping of the Powers at the beginning of war had 
thrown the counsels of Poland there emerged at last the 
decision that the Polish Legions, a peace organisation 
in Galicia directed by Pilsudski (afterwards given the 
rank of General and now apparently the Chief of the 
Government in Warsaw), should take the field against 
the Russians. In reality it did not matter against 
which partner in the "Crime" Polish resentment 
should be directed. There was little to choose be- 
tween the methods of Russian barbarism, which were 
both crude and rotten, and the cultivated brutality 
tinged with contempt of Germany's superficial, grind- 
ing civilisation. There was nothing to choose between 
them. Both were hateful, and the direction of the 
Polish effort was naturally governed by Austria's 
tolerant attitude, which had connived for years at the 
semi-secret organisation of the Polish Legions. Be- 
sides, the material possibility pointed out the way. 
That Poland should have turned at first against the 
ally of Western Powers, to whose moral support she 
had been looking for so many years, is not a greater 
monstrosity than that alliance with Russia which had 
been entered into by England and France with rather 
less excuse and with a view to eventualities which 
could perhaps have been avoided by a firmer policy 
and by a greater resolution in the face of what plainly 
appeared unavoidable. 

For let the truth be spoken. The action of Germany, 
however cruel, sanguinary, and faithless, was nothing 
in the nature of a stab in the dark. The Germanic 
Tribes had told the whole world in all possible tones 
carrying conviction, the gently persuasive, the coldly 



THE CRIME OF PARTITION U5 

logical; in tones Hegelian, Nietzschean, war-like, pious, 
cynical, inspired, what they were going to do to the 
inferior races of the earth, so full of sin and all un- 
worthiness. But with a strange similarity to the prophets 
of old (who were also great moralists and invokers of 
might) they seemed to be crying in a desert. Whatever 
might have been the secret searching of hearts, the 
Worthless Ones would not take heed. It must also be 
adroitted that the conduct of the menaced Govern- 
ments carried with it no suggestion of resistance. It 
was no doubt, the effect of neither courage nor fear, but 
of that prudence which causes the average man to 
stand very still in the presence of a savage dog. It was 
not a very politic attitude, and the more reprehensible 
in so far that it seemed to arise from the mistrust of their 
own people's fortitude. On simple matters of life and 
death a people is always better than its leaders, because a 
people cannot argue itself as a whole into a sophisticated 
state of mind out of deference for a mere doctrine or 
from an exaggerated sense of its own cleverness. I am 
speaking now of democracies whose chiefs resemble the 
tyrant of Syracuse in this that their power is unlimited 
(for who can limit the will of a voting people?) and who 
always see the domestic sword hanging by a hair above 
their heads. 

Perhaps a different attitude would have checked Ger- 
man self-confidence, and her overgrown militarism would 
have died from the excess of its own strength. What 
would have been then the moral state of Europe it is 
diflScult to say. Some other excess would probably 
have taken its place, excess of theory, or excess of senti- 
ment, or an excess of the sense of security leading to 
some other form of catastrophe; but it is certain that in 
that case the Polish question would not have taken a 
concrete form for ages. Perhaps it would never have 



126 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

taken form! In this world, where everything is tran- 
sient, even the most reproachful ghosts end by vanish- 
ing out of old mansions, out of men's consciences. 
Progress of enlightenment, or decay of faith? In the 
years before the war the Polish ghost was becoming 
so thin that it was impossible to get for it the slightest 
mention in the papers. A young Pole coming to me 
from Paris was extremely indignant, but I, indulging 
in that detachment which is the product of greater age, 
longer experience, and a habit of meditation, refused 
to share that sentiment. He had gone begging for a 
word on Poland to many influential people, and they 
had one and all told him that they were going to do no 
such thing. They were all men of ideas and therefore 
might have been called idealists, but the notion most 
strongly anchored in their minds was the folly of touch- 
ing a question which certainly had no merit of actuality 
and would have had the appalling effect of provoking 
the wrath of their old enemies and at the same time 
offending the sensibilities of their new friends. It was 
an unanswerable argument. I couldn't share my young 
friend's surprise and indignation. My practice of re- 
flection had also convinced me that there is nothing 
on earth that turns quicker on its pivot than political 
idealism when touched by the breath of practical 
politics. 

It would be good to remember that Polish independ- 
ence as embodied in a Polish State is not the gift of any 
kind of journalism, neither is it the outcome even of 
some particularly benevolent idea or of any clearly 
apprehended sense of guilt. I am speaking of what I 
know when I say that the original and only formative 
idea in Europe was the idea of delivering the fate of 
Poland into the hands of Russian Tsarism. And, let 
us remember, it was assumed then to be a victorious 



THE CRIME OF PARTITION 127 

Tsarism at that. It was an idea talked of openly, 
entertained seriously, presented as a benevolence, with 
a curious blindness to its grotesque and ghastly charac- 
ter. It was the idea of delivering the victim with a kindly 
smile and the confident assurance that "it would be all 
right" to a perfectly unrepentant assassin who after 
sawing furiously at its throat for a hundred years or so, 
was expected to make friends suddenly and kiss it on 
both cheeks in the mystic Russian fashion. It was a 
singularly nightmarish combination of international 
polity, and no whisper of any other would have been 
officially tolerated. Indeed, I do not think in the whole 
extent of western Europe there was anybody who had 
the slightest mind to whisper on that subject. Those 
were the days of the dark future, when Benckendorf 
put down his name on the Committee for the Relief of 
Polish Populations driven by the Russian armies into 
the heart of Russia, when the Grand Duke Nicholas 
(the gentleman who advocated a St. Bartholomew's 
Night for the suppression of Russian liberalism) was 
displaying his "divine" (I have read the very word in 
an English newspaper of standing) strategy in the great 
retreat, when Mr. Iswolsky carried himself haughtily on 
the banks of the Seine, and it was beginning to dawn 
upon certain people there that he was a greater nuisance 
even than the Polish question. 

But there is no use in talking about all that. Some 
clever person has said that it is always the unexpected 
that happens, and on a calm and dispassionate survey 
the world does appear mainly to one as a scene of 
miracles. Out of Germany's strength, in whose pur- 
pose so many people refused to believe, came Poland's 
opportunity, in which nobody could have been expected 
to believe. Out of Russia's collapse emerged that for- 
bidden thmg, the Polish independence, not as a venge- 



128 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

ful jfigure, the retributive shadow of the crime, but as 
something much more soHd and more difficult to get rid 
of — a poHtical necessity and a moral solution. Directly 
it appeared its practical usefulness became undeniable, 
and also the fact that, for better or worse, it was im- 
possible to get rid of it again except by the unthinkable 
way of another carving, of another partition, of another 
crime. 

Therein lie the strength and the future of the thing 
so strictly forbidden no farther back than two years or 
so, of the Polish independence expressed in a Polish 
State. It comes into the world morally free, not in 
virtue of its sufferings, but in virtue of its miraculous 
rebirth and of its ancient claim for services rendered 
to Europe. Not a single one of the combatants of all 
the fronts of the world has died consciously for Poland's 
freedom. That supreme opportunity was denied even to 
Poland's own children. And it is just as well! Provi- 
dence in its inscrutable way had been merciful, for had 
it been otherwise the load of gratitude would have been 
too great, the sense of obligation too crushing, the joy of 
deliverance too fearful for mortals, common sinners 
with the rest of mankind before the eye of the Most 
High. Those who died East and West, leaving so much 
anguish and so much pride behind them, died neither 
for the creation of States, nor for empty words, nor yet 
for the salvation of general ideas. They died neither 
for democracy, nor leagues, nor systems, nor yet for 
abstract justice, which is an unfathomable mystery. 
They died for something too deep for words, too mighty 
for the common standards by which reason measures the 
advantages of life and death, too sacred for the vain dis- 
courses that come and go on the lips of dreamers, fanat- 
ics, humanitarians, and statesmen. They died . . . 

Poland's independence springs up from that great 



THE CRIME OF PARTITION 129 

immolation, but Poland's loyalty to Europe will not be 
rooted in anything so trenchant and burdensome as the 
sense of an immeasurable indebtedness, of that gratitude 
which in a worldly sense is sometimes called eternal, but 
which lies always at the mercy of weariness and is fatally 
condemned by the instability of human sentiments to 
end in negation. Polish loyalty will be rooted in some- 
thing much more solid and enduring, in something that 
could never be called eternal, but which is, in fact, life- 
enduring. It will be rooted in the national tempera- 
ment, which is about the only thing on earth that can be 
trusted. Men may deteriorate, they may improve too, 
but they don't change. Misfortune is a hard school 
which may either mature or spoil a national character, 
but it may be reasonably advanced that the long course 
of adversity of the most cruel kind has not injured the 
fundamental characteristics of the Polish nation which 
has proved its vitality against the most demoralizing 
odds. The various phases of the Polish sense of self- 
preservation struggling amongst the menacuig forces 
and the no less threatening chaos of the neighbouring 
Powers should be judged impartially. I suggest impar- 
tiality and not indulgence simply because, when apprais- 
ing the Polish question, it is not necessary to invoke the 
softer emotions. A little calm reflection on the past 
and the present is all that is necessary on the part 
of the Western world to judge the movements of a 
commimity whose ideals are the same, but whose 
situation is unique. This situation was brought vividly 
home to me in the course of an argument more than 
eighteen months ago. "Don't forget," I was told, 
"that Poland has got to live in contact with Germany 
and Russia to the end of time. Do you understand the 
force of that expression: 'To the end of time'.^ Facts 
must be taken into account, and especially appalling 



130 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

facts such as this, to which there is no possible remedy 
on earth. For reasons which are, properly speaking, 
physiological, a prospect of friendship with Germans or 
Russians even in the most distant future is unthinkable. 
Any alliance of heart and mind would be a monstrous 
thing, and monsters, as we all know, cannot live. You 
can't base your conduct on a monstrous conception. We 
are either worth or not worth preserving, but the horri- 
ble psychology of the situation is enough to drive the 
national mind to distraction. Yet under a destructive 
pressure, of which Western Europe can have no notion, 
applied by forces that were not only crushing but 
corrupting, we have preserved our sanity. Therefore 
there can be no fear of our losing our minds simply be- 
cause the pressure is removed. We have neither lost 
our heads nor yet our moral sense. Oppression, not 
merely political, but affecting social relations, family 
life, the deepest affections of human nature, and the 
very fount of natural emotions, has never made us 
vengeful. It is worthy of notice that with every in- 
centive present in our emotional reactions we had no 
recourse to political assassination. Arms in hand, 
hopeless or hopefully, and always against immeasurable 
odds, we did affirm ourselves and the justice of our 
cause; but wild justice has never been a part of our 
conception of national manliness. In all the history 
of Polish oppression there was only one shot fired which 
was not in battle. Only one! And the man who fired 
it in Paris at the Emperor Alexander II. was but an 
individual connected with no organisation, representing 
no shade of Polish opinion. The only effect in Poland 
was that of profound regret, not at the failure, but at 
the mere fact of the attempt. The history of our 
captivity is free from that stain; and whatever follies in 
the eyes of the world we may have perpetrated, we have 



THE CRIME OF PARTITION 131 

neither murdered our enemies nor acted treacherously 
against them, nor yet have been reduced to the point of 
cursing each other." 

I could not gainsay the truth of that discourse, I saw 
as clearly as my interlocutor the impossibility of the 
faintest sympathetic bond between Poland and her 
neighbours ever being formed in the future. The only 
course that remains to a reconstituted Poland is the 
elaboration, establishment, and preservation of the 
most correct method of political relations with neigh- 
bours to whom Poland's existence is bound to be a 
humiliation and an offence. Calmly considered it is an 
appalling task, yet one may put one's trust in that 
national temperament which is so completely free from 
aggressiveness and revenge. Therein lie the founda- 
tions of all hope. The success of renewed hfe for that 
nation whose fate is to remain in exile, ever isolated 
from the West, amongst hostile surroundings, depends 
on the sympathetic understanding of its problems by its 
distant friends, the Western Powers, which in their 
democratic development must recognize the moral and 
intellectual kinship of that distant outpost of their own 
type of civilisation, which was the only basis of Polish 
culture. 

Whatever may be the future of Russia and the final 
organisation of Germany, the old hostility must remain 
unappeased, the fundamental antagonism must endure 
for years to come. The Crime of the Partition was 
committed by autocratic Governments which were the 
Governments of their time; but those Governments 
were characterised in the past, as they will be in the 
future, by their people's national traits, which remain 
utterly incompatible with the Polish mentaHty and 
Polish sentiment. Both the German submissiveness 
(idealistic as it may be) and the Russian lawlessness 



132 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

(fed on the corruption of all the virtues) are utterly 
foreign to the Polish nation, whose qualities and de- 
fects are altogether of another kind, tending to a certain 
exaggeration of individualism and, perhaps, to an ex- 
treme belief in the Governing Power of Free Assent : the 
one invariably vital principle in the internal government 
of the Old Republic. There was never a history more 
free from political bloodshed than the history of the 
Polish State, which never knew either feudal in- 
stitutions or feudal quarrels. At the time when heads 
were falling on the scaffolds all over Europe there was 
only one political execution in Poland — only one; and 
as to that there still exists a tradition that the great 
Chancellor who democratised Polish institutions, and 
had to order it in pursuance of his political purpose, 
could not settle that matter with his conscience till the 
day of his death. Poland, too, had her civil wars, but 
this can hardly be made a matter of reproach to her by 
the rest of the world. Conducted with humanity, they 
left behind them no animosities and no sense of re- 
pression, and certainly no legacy of hatred. They were 
but a recognised argument in a pohtical discussion and 
tended always towards conciliation. 

I cannot imagine, whatever form of democratic gov- 
ernment Poland elaborates for itself, that either the 
nation or its leaders would do 'anything but welcome 
the closest scrutiny of their renewed political existence. 
The difficulty of the problem of that existence will be 
so great that some errors will be unavoidable, and one 
may be sure that they will be taken advantage of by 
its neighbours to discredit that living witness to a great 
historical crime. If not the actual frontiers, then the 
moral integrity of the new State is sure to be assailed 
before the eyes of Europe. Economical enmity will 
also come into play when the world's work is resumed 



THE CRIME OF PARTITION 133 

again and competition asserts its power. Charges of 
aggression are certain to be made, especially as related 
to the small States formed of the territories of the Old 
Republic. And everybody knows the power of lies 
which go about clothed in coats of many colours, 
whereas, as is well known. Truth has no such advantage, 
and for that reason is often suppressed as not altogether 
proper for everyday purposes. It is not often recog- 
nised, because it is not always fit to be seen. 

Already there are innuendoes, threats, hints thrown 
out, and even awful instances fabricated out of in- 
adequate materials, but it is historically unthinkable 
that the Poland of the future, with its sacred tradition 
of freedom and its hereditary sense of respect for the 
rights of individuals and States, should seek its pros- 
perity in aggressive action or in moral violence against 
that part of its once fellow-citizens who are Ru- 
thenians or Lithuanians. The only influence that can- 
not be restrained is simply the influence of time, which 
disengages truth from all facts with a merciless logic and 
prevails over the passing opinions, the changing impulses 
of men. There can be no doubt that the moral im- 
pulses and the material interests of the new nationali- 
ties, which seem to play now the game of disintegration 
for the benefit of the world's enemies, will in the end 
bring them nearer to the Poland of this war's creation, 
will unite them sooner or later by a spontaneous move- 
ment towards the State which had adopted and brought 
them up in the development of its own humane culture 
— the offspring of the West. 



i 



A NOTE ON THE POLISH PROBLEM 

1916 

We must start from the assumption that promises 
made by proclamation at the beginning of this war may 
be binding on the individuals who made them under the 
stress of coming events but cannot be regarded as bind- 
ing the Governments after the end of the war. 

Poland has been presented with three proclama- 
tions. Two of them were in such contrast with the 
avowed principles and the historic action for the last 
hundred years (since the Congress of Vienna) of the 
Powers concerned, that they were more like cynical in- 
sults to the nation's deepest feelings, its memory and 
its intelligence, than state papers of a conciliatory 
nature. 

The German promises awoke nothing but indignant 
contempt; the Russian a bitter incredulity of the 
most complete kind. The Austrian proclamation, 
which made no promises and contented itself with 
pointing out the Austro-PoHsh relations for the last 
45 years, was received in silence. For it is a fact that 
in Austrian Poland alone Polish nationality was recog- 
nised as an element of the Empire and that the in- 
dividuals could breathe the air of freedom, of civil life, ' 
if not of political independence. 

But for Poles to be Germanophile is unthinkable. 
To be Russophile or Austrophile is at best a counsel of 
despair in view of a European situation which, because 
of the grouping of the Powers, seems to shut from them 

134 



A NOTE ON THE POLISH PROBLEM 135 

every hope, expressed or unexpressed, of a national 
future nursed through more than a hundred years of 
suffering and oppression. 

Through most of these years, and especially since 
1830, Poland (I use this expression since Poland exists 
as a spiritual entity to-day as definitely as it ever ex- 
isted in her past) has put her faith in the Western 
Powers. Politically it may have been nothing more 
than a consoling illusion, and the nation had a half- 
consciousness of this. But what Poland was looking 
for from the Western Powers without discouragement 
and with unbroken confidence was moral support. 

This is a fact of the sentimental order. But such 
facts have their positive value, for their idealism de- 
rives from perhaps the highest kind of reality. A 
sentiment asserts its claim by its force, persistence and 
universality. In Poland that sentimental attitude 
towards the W^estern Powers is universal. It extends 
to all classes. The very children are affected by it as 
soon as they begin to think. 

The political value of such a sentiment consists in 
this that it is based on profound resemblances. There- 
fore one can build on it as if it w^ere a material fact. 
For the same reason it would be unsafe to disregard it 
if one proposed to build solidly. The Poles, whom 
superficial or ill-informed theorists are trying to force 
into the social and psychological formula of Slavon- 
ism, are in truth not Slavonic at all. In temperament, 
in feeling, in mind, and even in unreason, they are 
Western, with an absolute comprehension of all Western 
modes of thought, even of those which are remote from 
their historical experience. 

That element of racial unity which may be called 
Polonism, remained compressed between Prussian 
Germanism on one side and the Russian Slavonism on 



136 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

the other. For Germanism it feels nothing but hatred. 
But between Polonism and Slavonism there is not so 
much hatred as a complete and ineradicable incom- 
patibility. 

No political work of reconstructing Poland either 
as a matter of justice or expediency could be sound 
which would leave the new creation in dependence to 
Germanism or to Slavonism. 

The first need not be considered. The second must 
be — unless the Powers elect to drop the Polish question 
either imder the cover of vague assurances or without 
any disguise whatever. 

But if it is considered it will be seen at once that the 
Slavonic solution of the Polish Question can offer no 
guarantees of duration or hold the promise of security 
for the peace of Europe. 

The only basis for it would be the Grand Duke's 
Manifesto. But that Manifesto signed by a personage 
now removed from Europe to Asia and by a man, more- 
over, who if true to himself, to his conception of patri- 
otism and to his family tradition could not have put his 
hand to it with any sincerity of purpose, is now divested 
of all authority. The forcible vagueness of its promises, 
its startling inconsistency with the hundred years of 
ruthlessly denationalising oppression permit one to 
doubt whether it was ever meant to have any authority. 

But in any case it could have had no effect. The 
very nature of things would have brought to nought 
its professed intentions. 

It is impossible to suppose that a State of Russia's 
power and antecedents would tolerate a privileged 
community (of, to Russia, unnational complexion) 
within the body of the Empire. All history shows 
that such an arrangement however, hedged in by the 
most solemn treaties and declarations, cannot last. 



A NOTE ON THE POLISH PROBLEM 137 

In this case it would lead to a tragic issue. The ab- 
sorption of Polonism is unthinkable. The last hundred 
years of European history proves it undeniably. 
There remains then extirpation, a process of blood and 
iron; and the last act of the Polish drama would be 
played then before a Europe too weary to interfere, and 
to the applause of Germany. 

It would not be just to say that the disappearance 
of Polonism would add any strength to the Slavonic 
power of expansion. It would add no strength but it 
would remove a possibly effective barrier against the 
surprises the future of Europe may hold in store for the 
Western Powers. 

Thus the question whether Polonism is worth saving 
presents itself as a problem of politics with a practical 
bearing on the stability of European peace — as a 
barrier or perhaps better (in view of its detached posi- 
tion) as an outpost of the Western Powers placed be- 
tween the great might of Slavonism which has not yet 
made up its mind to anything and the organised Ger- 
manism which has spoken its mind, with no uncertain 
voice, before the world. 

Looked at in that light alone Polonism seems worth 
saving. That it has lived so long on its trust in the 
moral support of the Western Powers may give it 
another and even stronger claim, based on a truth of a 
more profound kind. Polonism had resisted the utmost 
efforts of Germanism and Slavonism for more than a 
hundred years. Why.? Because of the strength of its 
ideals conscious of their kinship with the West. Such a 
power of resistance creates a moral obligation which it 
would be unsafe to neglect. There is always a risk in 
throwing away a tool of proved temper. 

In this profound conviction of the practical and 
ideal worth of Polonism one approaches the problem of 



138 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

its preservation with a very vivid sense of the practical 
diflSculties derived from the grouping of the Powers. 
The uncertainty of the extent and of the actual form 
of victory for the Allies will increase the difficulty of 
formulating a plan of Polish regeneration at the present 
moment. 

Poland, to strike its roots again into the soil of 
political Europe, will require a guarantee of security 
for the healthy development and for the untrammelled 
play of such institutions as she may be enabled to give 
to herself. 

Those institutions will be animated by the spirit 
of Polonism which, having been a factor in the history of 
Europe and having proved its vitality under oppression, 
has established its right to live. That spirit despised 
and hated by Germany and incompatible with Slavon- 
ism because of moral differences, cannot avoid being 
(in its renewed assertion) an object of dislike and mis- 
trust. 

As an unavoidable consequence of the past Poland 
will have to begin its existence in an atmosphere of 
enmities and suspicions. That advanced outpost of 
Western civilisation will have to hold its ground in 
the midst of hostile camps: always its historical fate. 

Against the menace of such a specially dangerous 
situation the paper and ink of public Treaties cannot be 
an effective defence. Nothing but the actual, living, 
active participation of the two Western Powers in the 
establishment of the new Polish commonwealth and in 
the first 20 years of its existence, will give the Poles a 
sufficient guarantee of security in the work of restoring 
their national life. 

An Anglo-French protectorate would be the ideal 
form of moral and material support. But Russia, as 
an ally, must take her place in it on such a footing as 



A NOTE ON THE POLISH PROBLEM 139 

will allay to the fullest extent her possible apprehensions 
and satisfy her national sentiment. That necessity 
will have to be formally recognised. 

In reality Russia has ceased to care much for her 
Polish possessions. Public recognition of a mistake 
in political morality and a voluntary surrender of 
territory in the cause of European concord, cannot 
damage the prestige of a powerful State. The new 
spheres of expansion in regions more easily assimilable, 
will more than compensate Russia for the loss of ter- 
ritory on the Western frontier of the Empire. 

The experience of Dual Controls and similar com- 
binations has been so unfortunate in the past that the 
suggestion of a Triple Protectorate may well appear at 
first sight monstrous even to unprejudiced minds. But 
it must be remembered that this is a unique case and a 
problem altogether exceptional, justifying the employ- 
ment of exceptional means for its solution. To those 
who would doubt the possibility of even bringing such 
a scheme into existence the answer may be made that 
there are psychological moments when any measure 
tending towards the ends of concord and justice may 
be brought into being. And it seems that the end of 
the war would be the moment for bringing into being 
the political scheme advocated in this note. 

Its success must depend on the singleness of purpose 
in the contracting Powers, and on the wisdom, the tact, 
the abilities, the good-will of men entrusted with its 
initiation and its further control. Finally it may be 
pointed out that this plan is the only one offering serious 
guarantees to all the parties occupying their respective 
positions within the scheme. 

If her existence as a State is admitted as just, ex- 
pedient and necessary, Poland has the moral right to re- 
ceive her constitution not from the hand of an old 



140 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

enemy, but from the Western Powers alone, though of 
course with the fullest concurrence of Russia. 

This constitution, elaborated by a committee of Poles 
nominated by the three Governments, will (after due 
discussion and amendment by the High Commissioners 
of the Protecting Powers) be presented to Poland as the 
initial document, the charter of her new life, freely 
offered and unreservedly accepted. 

It should be as simple and short as a written con- 
stitution can be — establishing the Polish Common- 
wealth, settling the lines of representative institutions, 
the form of Judicature, and leaving the greatest meas- 
ure possible of self-government to the provinces form- 
ing part of the re-created Poland. 

This constitution will be promulgated immediately 
after the three Powers had settled the frontiers of the 
new State, including the town of Danzic (free port) and 
a proportion of seaboard. The legislature will then 
be called together and a general treaty will regulate 
Poland's international portion as a protected State, the 
status of the High Commissioners and such-like matters. 
The legislature will ratify, thus making Poland, as it 
were, a party in the establishment of the protectorate. 
A point of importance. 

Other general treaties will define Poland's position in 
the Anglo-Franco-Russian alliance, fix the numbers of 
the army, and settle the participation of the Powers in 
its organisation and training. 



POLAND REVISITED 
1915 



I HAVE never believed in political assassination as a 
means to an end, and least of all in assassination of the 
dynastic order. I don't know how far murder can ever 
approach the perfection of a fine art, but looked upon 
with the cold eye of reason it seems but a crude expe- 
dient of impatient hope or hurried despair. There are 
few men whose premature death could influence human 
affairs more than on the surface. The deeper stream 
of causes depends not on individuals who, like the mass 
of mankind, are carried on by a destiny which no 
murder has ever been able to placate, divert, or arrest. 

In July of last year I was a stranger in a strange 
city in the Midlands and particularly out of touch with 
the world's politics. Never a very diligent reader of 
newspapers, there were at that time reasons of a private 
order which caused me to be even less informed than 
usual on public affairs as presented from day to day in 
that necessarily atmosphereless, perspectiveless manner 
of the daily papers, which somehow, for a man possessed 
of some historic sense, robs them of all real interest. I 
don't think I had looked at a daily for a month past. 

But though a stranger in a strange city I was not 
lonely, thanks to a friend who had travelled there out 
of pure kindness to bear me company in a conjuncture 
which, in a most private sense, was somewhat trying. 

141 



142 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

It was this friend who, one morning at breakfast, 
informed me of the murder of the Archduke Ferdinand. 

The impression was mediocre. I was barely aware 
that such a man existed. I remembered only that not 
long before he had visited London. The recollection 
was rather of a cloud of insignificant printed words his 
presence in this country provoked. 

Various opinions had been expressed of him, but his 
importance was Archducal, dynastic, purely accidental. 
Can there be in the world of real men anything more 
shadowy than an Archduke.'^ And now he was no 
more; removed with an atrocity of circumstances which 
made one more sensible of his humanity than when he 
was in life. I connected that crime with Balkanic 
plots and aspirations so little that I had actually to ask 
where it had happened. My friend told me it was in 
Serajevo, and wondered what would be the conse- 
quences of that grave event. He asked me what I 
thought would happen next. 

It was with perfect sincerity that I answered "Noth- 
ing," and having a great repugnance to consider murder 
as a factor of politics, I dismissed the subject. It 
fitted with my ethical sense that an act cruel and 
absurd should be also useless. I had also the vision of 
a crowd of shadowy Archdukes in the background, out 
of which one would step forward to take the place of 
that dead man in the light of the European stage. And 
then, to speak the whole truth, there was no man 
capable of forming a judgment who attended so little 
to the march of events as I did at that time. What for 
want of a more definite term I must call my mind was 
fixed upon my own affairs, not because they were in 
a bad posture, but because of their fascinating holiday- 
promising aspect. I had been obtaining my informa- 
tion as to Europe at second hand, from friends good 



POLAND REVISITED 143 

enough to come down now and then to see us. They 
arrived with their pockets full of crumpled newspapers, 
and answered my queries casually, with gentle smiles 
of scepticism as to the reality of my interest. And yet 
I was not indifferent; but the tension in the Balkans had 
become chronic after the acute crisis, and one could not 
help being less conscious of it. It had wearied out one's 
attention. Who could have guessed that on that wild 
stage we had just been looking at a miniature rehearsal 
of the great world-drama, the reduced model of the 
very passions and violences of what the future held in 
store for the Powers of the Old World.? Here and 
there, perhaps, rare minds had a suspicion of that 
possibility, while they watched Old Europe stage-man- 
aging fussily by means of notes and conferences, the 
prophetic reproduction of its awaiting fate. It was 
wonderfully exact in the spirit; same roar of guns, 
same protestations of superiority, same words in the air; 
race, liberation, justice — and the same mood of trivial 
demonstrations. One could not take to-day a ticket for 
Petersburg. "You mean Petrograd," would say the 
booking clerk. Shortly after the fall of Adrianople a 
friend of mine passing through Sophia asked for some 
caje Turc at the end of his lunch. 

''Monsieur vent dire Cafe balkanique/' the patriotic 
waiter corrected him austerely. 

I will not say that I had not observed something of 
that instructive aspect of the war of the Balkans both 
in its first and in its second phase. But those with 
whom I touched upon that vision were pleased to see in 
it the evidence of my alarmist cynicism. As to alarm, 
I pointed out that fear is natural to man, and even 
salutary. It has done as much as courage for the 
preservation of races and institutions. But from a 
charge of cynicism I have always shrunk instinctively. 



144 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

It is like a charge of being blind in one eye, a moral 
disablement, a sort of disgraceful calamity that must 
be carried off with a jaunty bearing — a sort of thing I 
am not capable of. Rather than be thought a mere 
jaunty cripple I allowed myself to be blinded by the 
gross obviousness of the usual arguments. It was 
pointed out to me that these Eastern nations were not 
far removed from a savage state. Their economics 
were yet at the stage of scratching the earth and feeding 
the pigs. The highly developed material civilisation 
of Europe could not allow itself to be disturbed by a 
war. The industry and the finance could not allow 
themselves to be disorganised by the ambitions of an 
idle class, or even the aspirations, whatever they might 
be, of the masses. 

Very plausible all this sounded. War does not pay. 
There had been a book written on that theme — an 
attempt to put pacificism on a material basis. Nothing 
more solid in the way of argument could have been ad- 
vanced on this trading and manufacturing globe. War 
was "bad business!" This was final. 

But, truth to say, on this July day I reflected but 
little on the condition of the civilised world. Whatever 
sinister passions were heaving under its splendid and 
complex surface, I was too agitated by a simple and 
innocent desire of my own, to notice the signs or inter- 
pret them correctly. The most innocent of passions 
will take the edge off one's judgment. The desire which 
possessed me was simply the desire to travel. And that 
being so it would have taken something very plain in 
the way of symptoms to shake my simple trust in the 
stability of things on the Continent. My sentiment 
and not my reason was engaged there. My eyes were 
turned to the past, not to the future; the past that one 
cannot suspect and mistrust, the shadowy and un- 



POLAND REVISITED 145 

questionable moral possession the darkest struggles of 
which wear a halo of glory and peace. 

In the preceding month of May we had received 
an invitation to spend some weeks in Poland in a 
country house in the neighbourhood of Cracow, but 
within the Russian frontier. The enterprise at first 
seemed to me considerable. Since leaving the sea, to 
which I have been faithful for so many years, I have 
discovered that there is in my comp>osition very little 
stuff from which travellers are made. I confess that my 
first impulse about a projected journey is to leave it 
alone. But the invitation received at first with a sort 
of dismay ended by rousing the dormant energy of 
my feelings. Cracow is the town where I spent with 
my father the last eighteen months of his life. It was 
in that old royal and academical city that I ceased to be 
a child, became a boy, had known the friendships, the 
admirations, the thoughts and the indignations of that 
age. It was within those historical walls that I began 
to understand things, form affections, lay up a store of 
memories and a fund of sensations with which I was to 
break violently by throwing myself into an unrelated 
existence. It was like the experience of another world. 
The wings of time made a great dusk over all this, 
and I feared at first that if I ventured bodily in there I 
would discover that I who have had to do with a good 
many imaginary lives have been embracing mere 
shadows in my youth. I feared. But fear in itself 
may become a fascination. Men have gone, alone and 
trembling, into graveyards at midnight — just to see 
what would happen. And this adventure was to be 
pursued in sunshine. Neither would it be pursued 
alone. The invitation was extended to us all. This 
journey would have something of a migratory charac- 
ter, the invasion of a tribe. My present, all that gave 



146 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

solidity and value to it, at any rate, would stand by me 
in this test of the reality of my past. I was pleased 
with the idea of showing my companions what Polish 
country life was like; to visit the town where I was at 
school before the boys by my side should grow too old, 
and gaining an individual past of their own, should lose 
their unsophisticated interest in mine. It is only in the 
short instants of early youth that we have the faculty of 
coming out of ourselves to see dimly the visions and 
share the emotions of another soul. For youth all is 
reality in this world, and with justice, since it appre- 
hends so vividly its images behind which a longer life 
makes one doubt whether there is any substance. I 
trusted to the fresh receptivity of these young beings 
in whom, unless Heredity is an empty word, there 
should have been a fibre which would answer to the 
sight, to the atmosphere, to the memories of that cor- 
ner of the earth where my own boyhood had received 
its earliest independent impressions. 

The first days of the third week in July, while 
the telegraph wires hummed with the words of enormous 
import which were to fill blue books, yellow books, 
white books, and to arouse the wonder of mankind, 
passed for us in light-hearted preparations for the 
journey. What was it but just a rush through Ger- 
many, to get across as quickly as possible? 

Germany is the part of the earth's solid surface of 
which I know the least. In all my life I had been across 
it only twice. I may well say of it vidi tantum; 
and the very little I saw was through the window of a 
railway carriage at express speed. Those journeys of 
mine had been more like pilgrimages when one hurries 
on towards the goal for the satisfaction of a deeper need 
than curiosity. In this last instance, too, I was so in- 
curious that I would have liked to have fallen asleep on 



POLAND REVISITED 147 

the shores of England and opened my eyes, if it were 
possible, only on the other side of the Silesian frontier. 
Yet, in truth, as many others have done, I had "sensed 
it" — that promised land of steel, of chemical dyes, of 
method, of efficiency; that race planted in the middle 
of Europe, assuming in grotesque vanity the attitude of 
Europeans amongst effete Asiatics or barbarous niggers ; 
and, with a consciousness of superiority freeing their 
hands from all moral bonds, anxious to take up, if I may 
express myself so, the "perfect man's burden." Mean- 
time, in a clearing of the Teutonic forest, their sages 
were rearing a Tree of Cynical Wisdom, a sort of Upas 
tree, whose shade may be seen now lying over the 
prostrate body of Belgium. It must be said that they 
laboured openly enough, watering it with the most 
authentic sources of all madness, and watching with 
their be-spectacled eyes the slow ripening of the glorious 
blood-red fruit. The sincerest words of peace, words 
of menace, and I verily believe words of abasement, 
even if there had been a voice vile enough to utter them, 
would have been wasted on their ecstasy. For when 
the fruit ripens on a branch it must fall. There is 
nothing on earth that can prevent it. 

II 

For reasons which at first seemed to me somewhat 
obscure, that one of my companions whose wishes are 
law, decided that our travels should begin in an unusual 
way by the crossing of the North Sea. We should pro- 
ceed from Harwich to Hamburg. Besides being 36 
times longer than the Dover-Calais passage this rather 
unusual route had an air of adventure in better keeping 
with the romantic feeling of this Polish journey which 
for so many years had been before us in a state of a pro- 



148 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

ject full of colour and promise, but always retreating, 
elusive like an enticing mirage. 

And, after all, it had turned out to be no mirage. 
No wonder they were excited. It's no mean experience 
to lay your hands on a mirage. The day of departure 
had come, the very hour had struck. The luggage was 
coming downstairs. It was most convincing. Poland 
then, if erased from the map, yet existed in reality; it 
was not a mere pays du reve, where you can travel 
only in imagination. For no man, they argued, not 
even father, an habitual pursuer of dreams, would push 
the love of the novelist's art of make-believe to the 
point of burdening himself with real trunks for a voy- 
age au "pays du reve. 

As we left the door of our house, nestling in, perhaps, 
the most peaceful nook in Kent, the sky, after weeks of 
perfectly brazen serenity, veiled its blue depths and 
started to weep fine tears for the refreshment of the 
parched fields. A pearly blur settled over them, and a 
light sifted of all glare, of everything unkindly and 
searching that dwells in the splendour of unveiled skies. 
All unconscious of going towards the very scenes of war, 
I carried off in my eye this tiny fragment of Great 
Britain; a few fields, a wooded rise; a clump of trees or 
two, with a short stretch of road, and here and there a 
gleam of red wall and tiled roof above the darkening 
hedges wrapped up in soft mist and peace. And I 
felt that all this had a very strong hold on me as the 
embodiment of a beneficent and gentle spirit; that it was 
dear to me not as an inheritance, but as an acquisition, 
as a conquest in the sense in which a woman is con- 
quered — by love, which is a sort of surrender. 

These were strange, as if disproportionate thoughts 
to the matter in hand, which was the simplest sort of 
a Continental holiday. And I am certain that my 



POLAND REVISITED 149 

companions, near as they are to me, felt no other 
trouble but the suppressed excitement of pleasurable 
anticipation. The forms and the spirit of the land 
before their eyes were their inheritance, not their con- 
quest — which is a thing precarious, and, therefore, 
the most precious, possessing you if only by the fear 
of un worthiness rather than possessed by you. More- 
over, as we sat together in the same railway carriage, 
they were looking forward to a voyage in space, whereas 
I felt more and more plainly that what I had started on 
was a journey in time, into the past; a fearful enough 
prospect for the most consistent, but to him who had 
not known how to preserve against his impulses the 
order and continuity of his life — so that at times it 
presented itself to his conscience as a series of betrayals 
— still more dreadful. 

I put down here these thoughts so exclusively per- 
sonal, to explain why there was no room in my conscious- 
ness for the apprehension of a European war. I don't 
mean to say that I ignored the possibility; I simply did 
not think of it. And it made no difference; for if I had 
thought of it, it could only have been in the lame and 
inconclusive way of the common uninitiated mortals; 
and I am sure that nothing short of intellectual certi- 
tude — obviously unattainable by the man in the street 
— could have stayed me on that journey which now that 
I had started on it seemed an irrevocable thing, a ne- 
cessity of my self-respect. 

London, the London before the war, flaunting its 
enormous glare, as of a monstrous conflagration up into 
the black sky — with its best Venice-like aspect of rainy 
evenings, the wet asphalted streets lying with the sheen 
of sleeping water in winding canals, and the great houses 
of the city towering all dark like empty palaces above 
the reflected lights of the glistening roadway. 



150 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

Everything in the subdued incomplete night-life 
around the Mansion House went on normally with its 
fascinating air of a dead commercial city of sombre walls 
through which the inextinguishable activity of its mil- 
lions streamed East and West in a brilliant flow of 
lighted vehicles. 

In Liverpool Street, as usual too, through the double 
gates, a continuous line of taxi-cabs glided down the in- 
cline approach and up again, like an endless chain of 
dredger-buckets, pouring in the passengers, and dipping 
them out of the great railway station under the inexor- 
able pallid face of the clock telling off the diminishing 
minutes of peace. It was the hour of the boat-trains to 
Holland, to Hamburg, and there seemed to be no lack of 
people, fearless, reckless, or ignorant, who wanted to go 
to these places. The station was normally crowded, and 
if there was a great flutter of evening papers in the 
multitude of hands, there were no signs of extraordinary 
emotion on that multitude of faces. There was nothing 
in them to distract me from the thought that it was sin- 
gularly appropriate that I should start from this station 
on the retraced way of my existence. For this was the 
station at which, thirty-seven years before, I arrived on 
my first visit to London. Not the same building, but 
the same spot. At nineteen years of age, after a period 
of probation and training I had imposed upon myself as 
ordinary seaman on board a North Sea coaster, I had 
come up from Lowestoft — my first long railway journey 
in England — to "sign on" for an Antipodean voyage in 
a deep-water ship. Straight from a railway carriage I 
had walked into the great city with something of the 
feeling of a traveller penetrating into a vast and unex- 
plored wilderness. No explorer could have been more 
lonely. I did not know a single soul of all these millions 
that all around me peopled the mysterious distances of 



POLAND REVISITED 151 

the streets. I cannot say I was free from a little youth- 
ful awe, but at that age one's feelings are simple. I was 
elated. I was pursuing a clear aim, I was carrying out a 
deliberate plan of making out of myself, in the first place, 
a seaman w^orthy of the service, good enough to work 
by the side of the men with whom I was to live; and in 
the second place, I had to justify my existence to myself, 
to redeem a tacit moral pledge. Both these aims were 
to be attained by the same effort. How simple seemed 
the problem of life then, on that hazy day of early 
September in the year 1878, when I entered London for 
the first time. 

From that point of view — Youth and a straight- 
forward scheme of conduct — it was certainly a year of 
grace. All the help I had to get in touch with the world 
I was invading was a piece of paper not much bigger 
than the palm of my hand — in which I held it — torn out 
of a larger plan of London for the greater facility of 
reference. It had been the object of careful study for 
some days past. The fact that I could take a convey- 
ance at the station never occurred to my mind, no, not 
even when I got out into the street, and stood, taking 
my anxious bearings, in the midst, so to speak, of 
twenty thousand hansoms. A strange absence of 
mind or unconscious conviction that one cannot ap- 
proach an important moment of one's life by means of 
a hired carriage.'^ Yes, it would have been a pre- 
posterous proceeding. And indeed I was to make an 
Australian voyage and encircle the globe before ever 
entering a London hansom. 

Another document, a cutting from a newspaper, con- 
taining the address of an obscure shipping agent, was in 
my pocket. And I needed not to take it out. That ad- 
dress was as if graven deep in my brain. I muttered its 
words to myself as I walked on, navigating the sea of 



152 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

London by the chart concealed in the palm of my hand; 
for I had vowed to myself not to inquire my way from 
any one. Youth is the timeof rash pledges. Had I taken 
a wrong turning I would have been lost; and if faith- 
ful to my pledge I might have remained lost for days, 
for weeks, have left perhaps my bones to be discovered 
bleaching in some blind alley of the Whitechapel 
district, as it had happened to lonely travellers lost in 
the bush. But I walked on to my destination without 
hesitation or mistake, showing there, for the first time, 
some of that faculty to absorb and make my own 
the imaged topography of a chart, which in later years 
was to help me in regions of intricate navigation to 
keep the ships entrusted to me off the ground. The 
place I was bound to was not easy to find. It was 
one of those courts hidden away from the charted and 
navigable streets, lost among the thick growth of 
houses like a dark pool in the depths of a forest, ap- 
proached by an inconspicuous archway as if by a se- 
cret path; a Dickensian nook of London, that wonder 
city, the growth of which bears no sign of intelligent 
design, but many traces of freakishly sombre phantasy 
the Great Master knew so well how to bring out by the 
magic of his understanding love. And the office I en- 
tered was Dickensian too. The dust of the Waterloo 
year lay on the panes and frames of its windows; early 
Georgian grime clung to its sombre wainscoting. 

It was one o'clock in the afternoon, but the day was 
gloomy. By the light of a single gas-jet depending 
from the smoked ceiling I saw an elderly man, in a long 
coat of black broadcloth. He had a grey beard, a big 
nose, thick lips, and heavy shoulders. His curly 
white hair and the general character of his head re- 
called vaguely a burly apostle in the barocco style of 
Italian art. Standing up at a tall, shabby, slanting 



POLAND REVISITED 153 

desk, his silver-rimmed spectacles pushed up high on his 
forehead, he was eating a mutton-chop, which had been 
just brought to him from some Dickensian eating-house 
round the corner. 

Without ceasing to eat he turned to me his florid 
barocco apostle's face with an expression of inquiry. 

I produced elaborately a series of vocal sounds which 
must have borne sufficient resemblance to the phonetics 
of English speech, for his face broke into a smile of com- 
prehension almost at once. "Oh it's you who wrote a 
letter to me the other day from Lowestoft about getting 
a ship." 

I had written to him from Lowestoft. I can't remem- 
ber a single word of that letter now. It was my very 
first composition in the English language. And he had 
understood it, evidently, for he spoke to the point at 
once, explaining that his business, mainly, was to find 
good ships for young gentlemen who wanted to go to 
sea as premium apprentices with a view of being trained 
for officers. But he gathered that this was not my 
object. I did not desire to be apprenticed. Was that 
the case.^^ 

It was. He was good enough to say then, "Of course 
I see that you are a gentleman. But your wish is to get 
a berth before the mast as an Able Seaman if possible. 
Is that it.?" 

It was certainly my wish; but he stated doubtfully 
that he feared he could not help me much in this. There 
was an Act of Parhament which made it penal to pro- 
cure ships for sailors. "An Act — of— Parliament. A 
law," he took pains to impress it again and again on my 
foreign imderstanding, while I looked at him in con- 
sternation. 

I had not been half an hour in London before I had 
run my head against an Act of Parliament! What a 



154 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

hopeless adventure ! However, the harocco apostle was 
a resourceful person in his way, and we managed to get 
round the hard letter of it without damage to its fine 
spirit. Yet, strictly speaking, it was not the conduct 
of a good citizen ; and in retrospect there is an unfilial 
flavour about that early sin of mine. For this Act of 
Parliament, the Merchant Shipping Act of the Victor- 
ian era, had been in a manner of speaking a father and 
mother to me. For many years it had regulated and 
disciplined my life, prescribed my food and the amount 
of my breathing space, had looked after my health and 
tried as much as possible to secure my personal safety 
in a risky calling. It isn't such a bad thing to lead a 
life of hard toil and plain duty within the four comers 
of an honest Act of Parliament. And I am glad to say 
that its severities have never been applied to me. 

In the year 1878, the year of ''Peace with Honour," I 
had walked as lone as any human being in the streets 
of London, out of Liverpool Street Station, to surrender 
myself to its care. And now, in the year of the war 
waged for honour and conscience more than for any 
other cause, I was there again, no longer alone, but a 
man of infinitely dear and close ties grown since that 
time, of work done, of words written, of friendships se- 
cured. It was like the closing of a thirty-six-year cycle. 

All unaware of the War Angel already awaiting, with 
the trumpet at his lips, the stroke of the fatal hour, I sat 
there, thinking that this life of ours is neither long nor 
short, but that it can appear very wonderful, entertain- 
ing, and pathetic, with symbolic images and bizarre 
associations crowded into one half -hour of retrospective 
musing. 

I felt, too, that this journey, so suddenly entered 
upon, was bound to take me away from daily life's 
actuahties at every step. I felt it more than ever when 



POLAND REVISITED 155 

presently we steamed out into the North Sea, on a dark 
night fitful with gusts of wind, and I lingered on deck, 
alone of all the tale of the ship's passengers. That sea 
was to me something unforgettable, something much 
more than a name. It had been for some time the 
school-room of my trade. On it, I may safely say, I 
had learned, too, my first words of English. A wild and 
stormy abode, sometimes, was that confined, shallow- 
water academy of seamanship from which I launched 
myself on the wide oceans. My teachers had been the 
sailors of the Norfolk shore; coast men, with steady 
eyes, mighty limbs, and gentle voice; men of very few 
words, which at least were never bare of meaning. 
Honest, strong, steady men, sobered by domestic ties, 
one and all, as far as I can remember. 

That is what years ago the North Sea I could hear 
growling in the dark all round the ship had been for me. 
And I fancied that I must have been carrying its voice 
in my ear ever since, for nothing could be more familiar 
than those short, angry sounds I was Hstening to with a 
smile of affectionate recognition. 

I could not guess that before many days my old 
school-room would be desecrated by violence, littered 
with wrecks, with death walking its waves, hiding un- 
der its waters. Perhaps while I am writing these words 
the children, or maybe the grandchildren, of my pacific 
teachers are out in trawlers, under the Naval flag, 
dredging for German submarine mines. 

Ill 

I have said that the North Sea was my finishing 
school of seamanship before I launched myself on the 
wider oceans. Confined as it is in comparison with the 
vast stage of this water-girt globe, I did not know it in 



156 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

all its parts. My class-room was the region of the 
English East Coast which, in the year of Peace with 
Honour, had long forgotten the war episodes belonging 
to its maritime history. It was a peaceful coast, 
agricultural, industrial, the home of fishermen. At 
night the lights of its many towns played on the clouds, 
or in clear weather lay still, here and there, in brilliant 
pools above the ink-black outline of the land. On 
many a night I have hauled at the braces under the 
shadow of that coast, envying, as sailors will, the people 
on the shore sleeping quietly in their beds within sound 
of the sea. I imagine that not one head on those envied 
pillows was made uneasy by the slightest premonition 
of the realities of naval war the short lifetime of one 
generation was to bring so close to their homes. 

Though far away from that region of kindly memories 
and traversing a part of the North Sea much less known 
to me, I was deeply conscious of the familiarity of my 
surroundings. It was a cloudy, nasty day: aiid the 
aspects of Nature don't change, unless in the course 
of thousands of years — or, perhaps, centuries. The 
Phoenicians, its first discoverers, the Romans, the first 
imperial rulers of that sea, had experienced days like 
this, so different in the wintry quality of the light, even 
on a July afternoon, from anything they had ever 
known in their native Mediterranean. For myself, a 
very late comer into that sea, and its former pupil, I 
accorded amused recognition to the characteristic aspect 
so well remembered from my days of training. The 
same old thing. A grey-green expanse of smudgy 
waters grinning angrily at one with white foam-ridges, 
and over all a cheerless, unglowing canopy, apparently 
made of wet blotting paper. From time to time a 
flurry of fine rain blew along like a puff of smoke across 
the dots of distant fishing boats, very few, very 



POLAND REVISITED 157 

scattered, and tossing restlessly on an ever dissolving, 
ever re-forming sky-line. 

Those flurries, and the steady rolling of the ship, 
accounted for the emptiness of the decks, favouring my 
reminiscent mood. It might have been a day of five 
and thirty years ago, when there were on this and every 
other sea more sails and less smoke-stacks to be seen. 
Yet, thanks to the unchangeable sea I could have given 
myself up to the illusion of a revived past, had it not 
been for the periodical transit across my gaze of a Ger- 
man passenger. He was marching round and round 
the boat deck with characteristic determination. Two 
sturdy boys gambolled round him in his progress like 
two disorderly satellites round their parent planet. He 
was bringing them home from their school in England 
for their holiday. What could have induced such 
a sound Teuton to entrust his offspring to the un- 
healthy influences of that effete, corrupt, rotten and 
criminal country I cannot imagine. It could hardly 
have been from motives of economy. I did not speak 
to him. He trod the deck of that decadent British 
ship with a scornful foot while his breast (and to a large 
extent his stomach, too) appeared expanded by the 
consciousness of a superior destiny. Later I could ob- 
serve the same truculent bearing, touched with the 
racial grotesqueness, in the men of the Landwehr corps, 
that passed through Cracow to reinforce the Aus- 
trian army in Eastern Galicia. Indeed, the haughty 
passenger might very well have been, most probably 
was, an officer of the Landwehr; and perhaps those two 
fine active boys are orphans by now. Thus things 
acquire significance by the lapse of time. A citizen, a 
father, a warrior, a mote in the dust-cloud of six mil- 
lion fighting particles, an unconsidered trifle for the 
jaws of war, his humanity was not consciously im- 



158 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

pressed on my mind at the time. Mainly, for me, 
he was a sharp tapping of heels round the comer of the 
deck-house, a white yachting cap and a green overcoat 
getting periodically between my eyes and the shifting 
cloud-horizon of the ashy-grey North Sea. He was 
but a shadowy intrusion and a disregarded one, for, far 
away there to the West, in the direction of the Dogger 
Bank, where fishermen go seeking their daily bread and 
sometimes find their graves, I could behold an ex- 
perience of my own in the winter of '81, not of war, 
truly, but of a fairly lively contest with the elements 
which were very angry indeed. 

There had been a troublesome week of it, including 
one hateful night — or a night of hate (it isn't for nothing 
that the North Sea is also called the German Ocean) — 
when all the fury stored in its heart seemed concen- 
trated on one ship which could do no better than 
float on her side in an unnatural, disagreeable, pre- 
carious, and altogether intolerable manner. There 
were on board, besides myself, seventeen men all good 
and true, including a round enormous Dutchman who, 
in those hours between sunset and sunrise, managed to 
lose his blown-out appearance somehow, became as it 
were deflated, and thereafter for a good long time moved 
in our midst wrinkled and slack all over like a half- 
collapsed balloon. The whimpering of our deck-boy, a 
skinny, impressionable little scarecrow out of a training- 
ship, for whom, because of the tender immaturity of his 
nerves, this display of German Ocean frightfulness was 
too much (before the year was out he developed into a 
sufficiently cheeky young ruffian), his desolate whimper- 
ing, I say, heard between the gusts of that ^black, sav- 
age night, was much more present to my mind and 
indeed to my senses than the green overcoat and 
the white cap of the German passenger circling the 



POLAND REVISITED 159 

deck indefatigably, attended by his two gyrating chil- 
dren. 

"That's a very nice gentleman." This information, 
together with the fact that he was a widower and a 
regular passenger twice a year by the ship, was com- 
municated to me suddenly by our captain. At inter- 
vals through the day he would pop out of the chart- 
room and offer me short snatches of conversation. He 
owned a simple soul and a not very entertaining mind, 
and he was without malice and, I believe, quite un- 
consciously, a warm Germanophil. And no wonder! 
As he told me himself, he had been fifteen years on that 
run, and spent almost as much of his life in Hamburg 
as in Harwich. 

"Wonderful people they are," he repeated from time 
to time, without entering into particulars, but with 
many nods of sagacious obstinacy. WTiat he knew of 
them, I suppose, were a few commercial travellers and 
small merchants, most likely. But I had observed 
long before that German genius has a hypnotising 
power over half-baked souls and half-lighted minds. 
There is an immense force of suggestion in highly 
organised mediocrity. Had it not hypnotised half 
Europe.^ My man was very much under the spell of 
German excellence. On the other hand, his contempt 
for France was equally general and unbounded. I 
tried to advance some arguments against this position, 
but I only succeeded in making him hostile. "I believe 
you are a Frenchman yourself," he snarled at last, giving 
me an intensely suspicious look; and forthwith broke off 
communications with a man of such unsound sympathies. 

Hour by hour the blotting-paper sky and the great 
flat greenish smudge of the sea had been taking on a 
darker tone, without any change in their colouring and 
texture. Evening was coming on over the North Sea. 



160 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

Black uninteresting hummocks of land appeared, dot- 
ting the duskiness of water and clouds in the Eastern 
board : tops of islands fringing the German shore. While 
I was looking at their antics amongst the waves — and 
for all their solidity they were very elusive things in the 
failing light — another passenger came out on deck. 
This one wore a dark overcoat and a grey cap. The 
yellow leather strap of his binocular case crossed his 
chest. His elderly red cheeks nourished but a very 
thin crop of short white hairs, and the end of his nose 
was so perfectly round that it determined the whole char- 
acter of his physiognomy. Indeed nothing else in it had 
the slightest chance to assert itself. His disposition, 
unlike the widower's, appeared to be mild and humane. 
He oflPered me the loan of his glasses. He had a wife 
and some small children concealed in the depths of the 
ship, and he thought they were very well where they 
were. His eldest son was about the decks somewhere. 

"We are Americans," he remarked weightily, but in 
a rather peculiar tone. He spoke English with the 
accent of our captain's "wonderful people," and pro- 
ceeded to give me the history of the family's crossing 
the Atlantic in a White Star liner. They remained in 
England just the time necessary for a railway journey 
from Liverpool to Harwich. His people (those in the 
depths of the ship) were naturally a little tired. 

At that moment a young man of about twenty, his 
son, rushed up to us from the fore-deck in a state of 
intense elation. "Hurrah," he cried under his breath. 
"The first German light! Hurrah!" 

And those two American citizens shook hands on it 
with the greatest fervour, while I turned away and re- 
ceived full in the eyes the brilliant wink of the Borkum 
lighthouse squatting low down in the darkness. The 
shade of the night had settled on the North Sea. 



POLAND REVISITED 161 

I do not think I have ever seen before a night so full 
of hghts. The great change of sea hfe since my time 
was brought home to me. I had been conscious all day 
of an interminable procession of steamers. They went 
on and on as if in chase of each other, the Baltic trade, 
the trade of Scandinavia, of Denmark, of Germany, 
pitching heavily into a head sea and bound for the 
gateway of Dover Straits. Singly, and in small com- 
panies of two and three, they emerged from the dull, 
colourless, sunless distances ahead as if the supply of 
rather roughly finished mechanical toys were inexhaus- 
tible in some mysterious cheap store away there, below 
the grey curve of the earth. Cargo steam vessels have 
reached by this time a height of utilitarian ugliness 
which, when one reflects that it is the product of hu- 
man ingenuity, strikes hopeless awe into one. These 
dismal creations look still uglier at sea than in port, and 
with an added touch of the ridiculous. Their rolling 
waddle when seen at a certain angle, their abrupt clock- 
work nodding in a sea-way, so unlike the soaring lift 
and swing of a craft under sail, have in them something 
caricatural, a suggestion of a low parody directed at 
noble predecessors by an improved generation of dull, 
mechanical toilers, conceited and without grace. 

When they switched on (each of these unlovely cargo 
tanks carried tame lightning within its slab-sided body), 
when they switched on their lamps they spangled the 
night with the cheap, electric, shop-glitter, here, there, 
and everywhere, as of some High Street, broken up and 
washed out to sea. Later, Heligoland cut into the over- 
head darkness with its powerful beam, infinitely pro- 
longed out of unfathomable night under the clouds. 

I remained on deck until we stopped and a steam 
pilot-boat, so overlighted amidships that one could not 
make out her complete shape, glided across our bows 



162 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

and sent a pilot on board. I fear that the oar, as a 
working implement, will become presently as obsolete 
as the sail. The pilot boarded us in a motor-dinghy. 
More and more is mankind reducing its physical activi- 
ties to pulling levers and twirling little wheels. Prog- 
ress ! Yet the older methods of meeting natural forces 
demanded intelligence too; an equally fine readiness of 
wits. And readiness of wits working in combination 
with the strength of muscles made a more complete 
man. 

It was really a surprisingly small dinghy and it ran 
to and fro like a water-insect fussing noisily down there 
with immense self-importance. Within hail of us the 
hull of the Elbe lightship floated all dark and silent 
under its enormous round, service lantern; a faithful 
black shadow watching the broad estuary full of lights. 

Such was my first view of the Elbe approached under 
the wings of peace ready for flight away from the luck- 
less shores of Europe. Our visual impressions remain 
with us so persistently that I find it extremely difiScult to 
hold fast to the rational belief that now everything is 
dark over there, that the Elbe lightship has been towed 
away from its post of duty, the triumphant beam of 
Heligoland extinguished, and the pilot-boat laid up, or 
turned to warlike uses for lack of its proper work to 
do. And obviously it must be so. 

Any trickle of oversea trade that passes yet that way 
must be creeping along cautiously with the unlighted, 
war-blighted black coast close on one hand, and sudden 
death on the other hand. For all the space we steamed 
through that Sunday evening must now be one great 
minefield, sown thickly with the seeds of hate; while 
submarines steal out to sea, over the very spot perhaps 
where the insect-dinghy put a pilot on board of us with 
so much fussy importance. Mines: Submarines. The 



POLAND REVISITED 163 

last word in sea-warfare! Progress — impressively dis- 
closed by this war. 

There have been other wars! Wars not inferior in 
the greatness of the stake and in the fierce animosity of 
feelings. During that one which was finished a hmidred 
years ago it happened that while the Enghsh Fleet was 
keeping watch on Brest, an American, perhaps Fulton 
himself, offered to the Maritime Prefect of the port and 
to the French Admiral, an invention which would sink 
all the unsuspecting English ships one after another — 
or, at any rate most of them. The offer was not even 
taken into consideration; and the Prefect ends his re- 
port to the Minister in Paris with a fine phrase of 
indignation: "It is not the sort of death one would 
deal to brave men." 

And behold, before history had time to hatch another 
war of the like proportions in the intensity of aroused 
passions and the greatness of issues, the dead flavour 
of archaism descended on the manly sentiment of those 
self-denying words. Mankind has been demoralised 
since by its own mastery of mechanical appliances. 
Its spirit is apparently so weak now, and its flesh has 
grown so strong, that it will face any deadly horror of 
destruction and cannot resist the temptation to use any 
stealthy, murderous contrivance. It has become the 
intoxicated slave of its own detestable ingenuity. It 
is true, too, that since the Napoleonic time another sort 
of war-doctrine has been inculcated in a nation, and 
held out to the world. 

IV 

On this journey of ours, which for me was essentially 
not a progress, but a retracing of footsteps on the 
road of life, I had no beacons to look for in Ger- 



164 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

many. I had never lingered in that land which, on the 
whole, is so singularly barren of memorable manifesta- 
tions of generous sympathies and magnanimous im- 
pulses. An ineradicable, invincible, provincialism of 
envy and vanity clings to the forms of its thought 
like a frowsy garment. Even while yet very young I 
turned my eyes away from it instinctively as from a 
threatening phantom. I believe that children and 
dogs have, in their innocence, a special power of per- 
ception as far as spectral apparitions and coming mis- 
fortunes are concerned. 

I let myself be carried through Germany as if it were 
pure space, without sights, without sounds. No whis- 
pers of the war reached my voluntary abstraction. And 
perhaps not so very voluntary after all ! Each of us is a 
fascinating spectacle to himself, and I had to watch my 
own personality returning from another world, as it were, 
to revisit the glimpses of old moons. Considering the 
condition of humanity, I am, perhaps, not so much 
to blame for giving myself up to that occupation. We 
prize the sensation of our continuity, and we can only 
capture it in that way. By watching. 

We arrived in Cracow late at night. After a scram- 
bly supper, I said to my eldest boy, "I can't go to bed. 
I am going out for a look round. Coming.?" 

He was ready enough. For him, all this was part of 
the interesting adventure of the whole journey. We 
stepped out of the portal of the hotel into an empty 
street, very silent, and bright with moonlight. I was, 
indeed, revisiting the glimpses of the moon. I felt so 
much like a ghost that the discovery that I could re- 
member such material things as the right turn to take 
and the general direction of the street gave me a mo- 
ment of wistful surprise. 

The street, straight and narrow, ran into the great 



POLAND REVISITED 165 

Market Square of the town, the centre of its affairs and 
of the Hghter side of its Hfe. We could see at the far end 
of the street a promising widening of space. At the 
corner an unassuming (but armed) poHceman, wearing 
ceremoniously at midnight a pair of white gloves which 
made his big hands extremely noticeable, turned his 
head to look at the grizzled foreigner holding forth 
in a strange tongue to a youth on whose arm he leaned. 

The Square, immense in its solitude, was full to the 
brim of moonlight. The garland of lights at the foot of 
the houses seemed to burn at the bottom of a bluish pool. 
I noticed with infinite satisfaction that the unnecessary 
trees the Municipality insisted upon sticking between 
the stones had been steadily refusing to grow. They 
were not a bit bigger than the poor victims I could re- 
member. Also, the paving operations seemed to be 
exactly at the same point at which I left them forty 
years before. There were the dull, torn-up patches on 
that bright expanse, the piles of paving material look- 
ing ominously black, like heads of rocks on a silvery sea. 
Who was it that said that Time works wonders .^^ What 
an exploded superstition! As far as these trees and 
these paving stones were concerned, it had worked noth- 
ing. The suspicion of the unchangeableness of things 
already vaguely suggested to my senses by our rapid 
drive from the railway station, was agreeably strength- 
ened within me. 

"We are now on the line A. B.," I said to my com- 
panion, importantly. 

It was the name bestowed in my time on one of the 
sides of the Square by the senior students of that town 
of classical learning and historical relics. The com- 
mon citizens knew nothing of it, and, even if they had, 
would not have dreamed of taking it seriously. He 
who used it was of the initiated, belonged to the schools. 



166 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

We youngsters regarded that name as a fine jest, the 
invention of a most excellent fancy. Even as I uttered 
it to my boy I experienced again that sense of my 
privileged initiation. And then, happening to look 
up at the wall, I saw in the light of the corner lamp, 
a white, cast-iron tablet fixed thereon, bearing an in- 
scription in raised black letters, thus: "Line A. B." 
Heavens ! The name had been adopted officially ! Any 
town urchin, any gutter-snipe, any herb-selling woman 
of the market-place, any wandering Boeotian, was free to 
talk of the line A. B., to walk on the line A. B., to 
appoint to meet his friends on the line A. B. It had 
become a mere name in a directory. I was stunned by 
the extreme mutability of things. Time could work 
wonders, and no mistake. A Municipality had stolen 
an invention of excellent fancy, and a fine jest had 
turned into a horrid piece of cast-iron. 

I proposed that we should walk to the other end of 
the line, using the profaned name, not only without gusto, 
but with positive distaste. And this, too, was one of 
the wonders of Time, for a bare minute had worked that 
change. There was at the end of the line a certain 
street I wanted to look at, I explained to my com- 
panion. 

To our right the unequal massive towers of St. Mary's 
Church soared aloft into the ethereal radiance of the air, 
very black on their shaded sides, glowing with a soft 
phosphorescent sheen on the others. In the distance 
the Florian Gate, thick and squat under its pointed 
roof, barred the street with the square shoulders of the 
old city wall. In the narrow, brilliantly pale vista of 
bluish flagstones and silvery fronts of houses, its black 
archway stood out small and very distinct. 

There was not a soul in sight, and not even the echo of 
a footstep for our ears. Into this coldly illuminated 



POLAND REVISITED 167 

and dumb emptiness there issued out of my aroused 
memory, a small boy of eleven, wending his way, not 
very fast, to a preparatory school for day-pupils on the 
second floor of the third house down from the Florian 
Gate. It was in the winter months of 1868. At eight 
o'clock of every morning that God made, sleet or shine, 
I walked up Florian Street. But of the school I 
remember very little. I believe that one of my co- 
sufferers there has become a much appreciated editor of 
historical documents. But I didn't suffer much from 
the various imperfections of my first school. I was rather 
indifferent to school troubles. I had a private gnawing 
worm of my own. This was the time of my father's 
last illness. Every evening at seven, turning my back 
on the Florian Gate, I walked all the way to a big old 
house in a quiet narrow street a good distance beyond the 
Great Square. There, in a large drawing-room, pan- 
elled and bare, with heavy cornices and a lofty ceiling, 
in a little oasis of light made by two candles in a des- 
ert of dusk I sat at a little table to worry and ink myself 
all over till the task of my preparation was done. The 
table of my toil faced a tall white door, which was kept 
closed; now and then it would come ajar and a nun in 
a white coif would squeeze herself through the crack, 
glide across the room, and disappear. There were two of 
these noiseless nursing nuns. Their voices were seldom 
heard. For, indeed, what could they have had to say? 
\Mien they did speak to me it was with their lips hardly 
moving, in a claustral clear whisper. Our domestic 
matters were ordered by the elderly housekeeper of our 
neighbour on the second floor, a Canon of the Cathe- 
dral, lent for the emergency. She, too, spoke but sel- 
dom. She wore a black dress with a cross hanging by 
a chain on her ample bosom. And though when she 
spoke she moved her lips more than the nuns, she never 



168 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

let her voice rise above a peacefully murmuring note. 
The air around me was all piety, resignation, and 
silence. 

I don't know what would have become of me if I had 
not been a reading boy. My prep finished I would have 
had nothing to do but sit and watch the awful stillness 
of the sick room flow out through the closed door and 
coldly enfold my scared heart. I suppose that in a 
futile childish way I would have gone crazy. But I was 
a reading boy. There were many books about, lying 
on consoles, on tables, and even on the floor, for we had 
not had time to settle down. I read! V^Tiat did I not 
read ! Sometimes the elder nun, gliding up and casting 
a mistrustful look on the open pages, would lay her hand 
lightly on my head and suggest in a doubtful whisper, 
*' Perhaps it is not very good for you to read these 
books." I would raise my eyes to her face mutely, and 
with a vague gesture of giving it up she would glide 
away. 

Later in the evening, but not always, I would be per- 
mitted to tip-toe into the sick room to say good-night to 
the figure prone on the bed, which often could not 
acknowledge my presence but by a slow movement of 
the eyes, put my lips dutifully to the nerveless hand 
lying on the coverlet, and tip-toe out again. Then I 
would go to bed, in a room at the end of the corridor, 
and often, not always, cry myself into a good sound 
sleep. 

I looked forward to what was coming with an in- 
credulous terror. I turned my eyes from it sometimes 
with success, and yet all the time I had an awful sensa- 
tion of the inevitable. I had also moments of revolt 
which stripped off me some of my simple trust in the 
government of the universe. But when the inevitable 
entered the sick room and the white door was thrown 



POLAND REVISITED 169 

wide open, I don't think I found a single tear to shed. I 
have a suspicion that the Canon's housekeeper looked 
on me as the most callous little wretch on earth. 

The day of the funeral came in due course and all the 
generous "Youth of the Schools," the grave Senate of 
the University, the delegations of the Trade-guilds, 
might have obtained (if they cared) de visu evidence of 
the callousness of the little wretch. There was nothing 
in my aching head but a few words, some such stupid 
sentences as, "It's done," or, "It's accomplished" (in 
Polish it is much shorter), or something of the sort, 
repeating itself endlessly. The long procession moved 
out of the narrow street, down a long street, past the 
Gothic front of St. Mary's under its unequal towers, 
towards the Florian Gate. 

In the moonlight-flooded silence of the old town of 
glorious tombs and tragic memories, I could see again 
the small boy of that day following a hearse; a space 
kept clear in which I walked alone, conscious of an 
enormous following, the clumsy swaying of the tall 
black machine, the chanting of the surpliced clergy at 
the head, the flames of tapers passing under the low 
archway of the gate, the rows of bared heads on the 
pavements with fixed, serious eyes. Half the popula- 
tion had turned out on that fine May afternoon. They 
had not come to honour a great achievement, or even 
some splendid failure. The dead and they were victims 
alike of an unrelenting destiny which cut them off from 
every path of merit and glory. They had come only to 
render homage to the ardent fidelity of the man whose 
life had been a fearless confession in word and deed of a 
creed which the simplest heart in that crowd could feel 
and understand. 

It seemed to me that if I remained longer there in 
that narrow street I should become the helpless prey of 



170 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

the Shadows I had called up. They were crowding 
upon me, enigmatic and insistent, in their clinging air 
of the grave that tasted of dust and of the bitter vanity 
of old hopes. 

"Let's go back to the hotel, my boy," I said. "It's 
getting late." 

It will be easily understood that I neither thought nor 
dreamt that night of a possible war. For the next two 
days I went about amongst my fellow men, who wel- 
comed me with the utmost consideration and friendli- 
ness, but unanimously derided my fears of a war. They 
would not believe in it. It was impossible. On the 
evening of the second day I was in the hotel's smoking 
room, an irrationally private apartment, a sanctuary 
for a few choice minds of the town, always pervaded by 
a dim reHgious light, and more hushed than any club 
reading-room I've ever been in. Gathered into a small 
knot, we were discussing the situation in subdued tones 
suitable to the genius of the place. 

A gentleman with a fine head of white hair suddenly 
pointed an impatient finger in my direction and apos- 
trophised me. 

"What I want to know is whether, should there be 
war, England would come in." 

The time to draw a breath, and I spoke out for the 
Cabinet without faltering. 

"Most assuredly. I should think all Europe knows 
that by this time." 

He took hold of the lapel of my coat, and, giving it a 
slight jerk for greater emphasis, said forcibly: 

"Then, if England will, as you say, and all the world 
knows it, there can be no war. Germany won't be so 
mad as that." 

On the morrow by noon we read of the German 
ultimatum. The day after came the declaration of 



POLAND REVISITED 171 

war,' and the Austrian mobilization order. We were 
fairly caught. All that remained for me to do was to 
get my party out of the way of eventual shells. The 
best move which occurred to me was to snatch them up 
instantly into the mountains to a Pohsh health resort of 
great repute — which I did (at the rate of one hundred 
miles in eleven hours) by the last civilian train per- 
mitted to leave Cracow for the next three weeks. 

And there we remained amongst the Poles from all 
parts of Poland, not oflScially interned, but simply un- 
able to obtain the permission to travel by train, or road. 
It was a wonderful, a poignant two months. This is 
not the time, and, perhaps, not the place, to enlarge 
upon the tragic character of the situation; a whole 
people seeing the culmination of its misfortunes in a 
final catastrophe, unable to trust any one, to appeal to 
any one, to look for help from any quarter; deprived of 
all hope and even of its last illusions, and unable, in the 
trouble of minds and the unrest of consciences, to take 
refuge in stoical acceptance. I have seen all this. And 
I am glad I have not so many years left me to remember 
that appalling feeling of inexorable fate, tangible, 
palpable, come after so many cruel years, a figure of 
dread, murmuring with iron lips the final words; Ruin — 
and Extinction. 

But enough of this. For our little band there was 
the awful anguish of incertitude as to the real nature of 
events in the West. It is difficult to give an idea how 
ugly and dangerous things looked to us over there. 
Belgium knocked down and trampled out of existence, 
France giving in under repeated blows, a military 
collapse Hke that of 1870, and England involved in that 
disastrous alliance, her army sacrificed, her people in a 
panic! Polish papers, of course, had no other but 
German sources of information. Naturally we did not 



# 



172 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

believe all we read, but it was sometimes excessively 
difficult to react with sufficient firmness. We used to 
shut our door, and there, away from everybody, we sat 
weighing the news, hunting up discrepancies, scenting 
lies, finding reasons for hopefulness, and generally 
cheering each other up. But it was a beastly time. 
People used to come to me with very serious news and 
ask, "What do you think of it.^^" And my invariable 
answer was, "Whatever has happened, or is going to 
happen, whoever wants to make peace, you may be 
certain that England will not make it, not for ten years, 
if necessary." 

But enough of this, too. Through the unremitting 
efforts of Polish friends we obtained at last the per- 
mission to travel to Vienna. Once there, the wing of 
the American Eagle was extended over our uneasy 
heads. We cannot be sufficiently grateful to the 
American Ambassador (who all along, interested him- 
self in our fate) for his exertions on our behalf, his in- 
valuable assistance and the real friendliness of his 
reception in Vienna. Owing to Mr. Penfield's action 
we obtained the permission to leave Austria. And 
it was a near thing, for his Excellency has informed my 
American publishers since that a week later orders 
were issued to have us detained till the end of the war. 
However, we effected our hair's-breadth escape into 
Italy; and, reaching Genoa, took passage in a Dutch 
mail steamer, homeward-bound from Java with London 
as a port of call. 

On that sea-route I might have picked up a memory 
at every mile if the past had not been eclipsed by the 
tremendous actuality. We saw the signs of it in the 
emptiness of the Mediterranean, the aspect of Gibraltar, 
the misty glimpse in the Bay of Biscay of an outward- 
bound convoy of transports, in the presence of British 



% 



POLAND REVISITED 173 

submarines in the Channel. Innumerable drifters flying 
the Naval flag dotted the narrow waters and two Naval 
officers coming on board off the South Foreland, piloted 
the ship through the Downs. 

The Downs! There they were, thick with the 
memories of my sea-life. But what were to me now the 
futilities of an individual past.^^ As our ship's head 
swung into the estuary of the Thames, a deep, yet faint, 
concussion passed through the air, a shock rather than a 
sound, which missing my ear found its way straight 
into my heart. Turning instinctively to look at my 
boys, I happened to meet my wife's eyes. She also had 
felt profoundly, coming from far away across the grey 
distances of the sea, the faint boom of the big guns at 
work on the coast of Flanders — shaping the future. 



FIRST NEWS 
1918 

Four years ago, on the first day of August, in the 
town of Cracow, Austrian Poland, nobody would 
believe that the war was coming. My apprehensions 
were met by the words: "We have had these scares 
before." This incredulity was so universal amongst 
people of intelligence and information, that even I, who 
had accustomed myself to look at the inevitable for 
years past, felt my conviction shaken. At that time, it 
must be noted, the Austrian army was already partly 
mobilised, and as we came through Austrian Silesia we 
had noticed all the bridges being guarded by soldiers. 

"Austria will back down," was the opinion of all the 
well-informed men with whom I talked on the first of 
August. The session of the University was ended and 
the students were either all gone or going home to 
different parts of Poland, but the professors had not all 
departed yet on their respective holidays, and amongst 
them the tone of scepticism prevailed generally. Upon 
the whole there was very little inclination to talk about 
the possibility of a war. Nationally, the Poles felt that 
from their point of view there was nothing to hope from 
it. "Whatever happens," said a very distinguished man 
to me, "we may be certain that it's our skins which will 
pay for it as usual." A well-known literary critic and 
writer on economical subjects said to me: " War seems a 
material impossibility, precisely because it would mean 
the complete ruin of all material interests." 

174 



rmST NEWS 175 

He was wrong, as we know; but those who said that 
Austria as usual would back down were, as a matter of 
fact, perfectly right. Austria did back down. What 
these men did not foresee was the interference of 
Germany. And one cannot blame them very well; for 
who could guess that, when the balance stood even, the 
German sword would be thrown into the scale with 
nothing in the open political situation to justify that 
act, or rather that crime — if crime can ever be justified? 
Fof, as the same intelligent man said to me: "As it is, 
those people" (meaning Germans) "have very nearly 
the whole world in their economic grip. Their prestige 
is even greater than their actual strength. It can get 
for them practically everything they want. Then why 
risk it.^" And there was no apparent answer to the 
question put in that way. I must also say that the 
Poles had no illusions about the strength of Russia. 
Those illusions were the monopoly of the Western 
world. 

Next day the librarian of the University invited me 
to come and have a look at the library which I had not 
seen since I was 14 years old. It was from him that I 
learned that the greater part of my father's MSS. was 
preserved there. He confessed that he had not looked 
them through thoroughly yet, but he told me that there 
was a lot of very important letters bearing on the epoch 
from '60 to '63, to and from many prominent Poles of 
that time; and he added: "There is a bundle of corres- 
pondence that will appeal to you personally. Those 
are letters written by your father to an intimate friend 
in whose papers they were found. They contain many 
references to yourself, though you couldn't have been 
more than four years old at the time. Your father 
seems to have been extremely interested in his son." 
That afternoon I went to the University, taking with 



176 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

me my eldest son. The attention of that young 
Enghshman was mainly attracted by some relics of 
Copernicus in a glass case. I saw the bundle of letters 
and accepted the kind proposal of the librarian that he 
should have them copied for me during the holidays. 
In the range of the deserted vaulted rooms lined with 
books, full of august memories, and in the passionless 
silence of all this enshrined wisdom, we walked here and 
there talking of the past, the great historical past in 
which lived the inextinguishable spark of national life; 
and all around us the centuries-old buildings lay still 
and empty, composing themselves to rest after a year of 
work on the minds of another generation. 

No echo of the German ultimatum to Russia pene- 
trated that academical peace. But the news had come. 
When we stepped into the street out of the deserted 
main quadrangle, we three, I imagine, were the only 
people in the town who did not know of it. My boy and 
I parted from the librarian (who hurried home to pack 
up for his holiday) and walked on to the hotel, where we 
found my wife actually in the car waiting for us to take 
a run of some ten miles to the country house of an old 
school-friend of mine. He had been my greatest chum. 
In my wanderings about the world I had heard that his 
later career both at school and at the University had 
been of extraordinary brilliance — in classics, I believe. 
But in this, the iron-grey moustache period of his life, he 
informed me with badly concealed pride that he had 
gained world fame as the Inventor — no. Inventor is not 
the word — Producer, I believe would be the right term 
— of a wonderful kind of beetroot seed. The beet 
grown from this seed contained more sugar to the 
square inch — or was it to the square root? — than any 
other kind of beet. He exported this seed, not only 
with profit (and even to the United States) , but with a 



FIRST NEWS 177 

certain amount of glory which seemed to have gone 
slightly to his head. There is a fundamental strain of 
agriculturalist in a Pole which no amount of brilliance, 
even classical, can destroy. While we were having tea 
outside, looking down the lovely slope of the gardens at 
the view of the city in the distance, the possibilities of 
the war faded from our minds. Suddenly my friend's 
wife came to us with a telegram in her hand and said 
calmly: "General mobilisation, do you know?" We 
looked at her like men aroused from a dream. "Yes," 
she insisted, "they are already taking the horses out of 
the ploughs and carts." I said: "We had better go 
back to town as quick as we can," and my friend as- 
sented with a troubled look: "Yes, you had better." 
As we passed through villages on our way back we saw 
mobs of horses assembled on the commons with soldiers 
guarding them, and groups of villagers looking on 
silently at the officers with their note-books checking 
deliveries and writing out receipts. Some old peasant 
women were already weeping aloud. 

When our car drew up at the door of the hotel, the 
manager himself came to help my wife out. In the 
first moment I did not quite recognise him. His 
luxuriant black locks were gone, his head was closely 
cropped, and as I glanced at it he smiled and said: 
"I shall sleep at the barracks to-night." 

I cannot reproduce the atmosphere of that night, the 
first night after mobilisation. The shops and the gate- 
ways of the houses were of course closed, but all through 
the dark hours the town hummed with voices; the 
echoes of distant shouts entered the open windows of our 
bedroom. Groups of men talking noisily walked in the 
middle of the roadway escorted by distressed women; 
men of all callings and of all classes going to report them- 
selves at the fortress. Now and then a military car 



178 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

tooting furiously would whisk through the streets empty 
of wheeled traffic, like an intensely black shadow under 
the great flood of electric lights on the grey pavement. 

But what produced the greatest impression on my 
mind was a gathering at night in the coffee-room of my 
hotel of a few men of mark whom I was asked to join. It 
was about one o'clock in the morning. The shutters 
were up. For some reason or other the electric light 
was not switched on, and the big room was lit up only by 
a few tall candles, just enough for us to see each other's 
faces by. I saw in those faces the awful desolation of 
men whose country, torn in three, found itself engaged 
in the contest with no will of its own and not even the 
power to assert itself at the cost of life. All the past 
was gone, and there was no future, whatever hap- 
pened; no road which did not seem to lead to moral 
annihilation. I remember one of those men addressing 
me after a period of mournful silence compounded of 
mental exhaustion and unexpressed forebodings. 

"What do you think England will do.^^ If there is a 
ray of hope anywhere it is only there." 

I said: "I believe I know what England will do" 
(this was before the news of the violation of Belgian 
neutrality arrived), "though I won't tell you, for I am 
not absolutely certain. But I can tell you what I am 
absolutely certain of . It is this: If England comes into 
the war, then, no matter who may want to make peace 
at the end of six months at the cost of right and justice, 
England will keep on fighting for years if necessary. 
You may reckon on that." 

" What, even alone .f^ " asked somebody across the room. 

I said: "Yes, even alone. But if things go so far as 
that England will not be alone." 

I think that at that moment I must have been in- 
spired. 



WELL DONE 

1918 



It can be safely said that for the last four years the 
seamen of Great Britain have done well. I mean that 
every kind and sort of human being classified as seaman, 
steward, fore-mast hand, fireman, lamp-trimmer, mate, 
master, engineer, and also all through the innumerable 
ratings of the Navy up to that of Admiral, has done 
well. I don't say marvellously well or miraculously 
well or wonderfully well or even very well, because 
these are simply over-statements of undisciplined 
minds. I don't deny that a man may be a marvellous 
being, but this is not likely to be discovered in his life- 
time, and not always even after he is dead. Man's 
marvellousness is a hidden thing, because the secrets of 
his heart are not to be read by his fellows. As to a 
man's work, if it is done well it is the very utmost that 
can be said. You can do well, and you do no more for 
people to see. Li the Navy, where human values are 
thoroughly understood, the highest signal of commenda- 
tion complimenting a ship (that is, a ship's company) on 
some achievement, consists exactly of those two simple 
words "Well done," followed by the name of the ship. 
Not marvellously done, astonishingly done, wonderfully 
done — no, only just: 

"Well done, so-and-so." 

And to the men it is a matter of infinite pride that 
somebody should judge it proper to mention aloud, as it 

179 



180 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

were, that they have done well. It is a memorable 
occurrence, for in the sea services you are expected pro- 
fessionally and as a matter of course to do well, because 
nothing less will do. And in sober speech no man can be 
expected to do more than well. The superlatives are 
mere signs of uninformed wonder. Thus the official 
signal which can express nothing but a delicate share of 
appreciation becomes a great honour. 

Speaking now as a purely civil seaman (or, perhaps, I 
ought to say civilian, because politeness is not what I 
have in my mind) I may say that I have never expected 
the Merchant Service to do otherwise than well during 
the war. There were people who obviously did not 
feel the same confidence, nay, who even confidently 
expected to see the collapse of merchant seamen's 
courage. I must admit that such pronouncements did 
arrest my attention. In my time I have never been 
able to detect any faint hearts in the ships' companies 
with whom I have served in various capacities. But 
I reflected that I had left the sea in '94, twenty years 
before the outbreak of the war that was to apply its 
severe test to the quality of modem seamen. Perhaps 
they had deteriorated, I said unwillingly to myself. I 
remembered also the alarmist articles I had read about 
the great number of foreigners in the British Merchant 
Service, and I didn't know how far these lamentations 
were justified. 

In my time the proportion of non-Britishers in the 
crews of the ships flying the red ensign was rather under 
one-third, which, as a matter of fact, was less than the 
proportion allowed under the very strict French naviga- 
tion laws for the crews of the ships of that nation. For 
the strictest laws aiming at the preservation of national 
seamen had to recognise the difficulties of manning 
merchant ships all over the world. The one-third of 



WELL DONE 181 

the French law seemed to be the irreducible minimum. 
But the British proportion was even less. Thus it may 
be said that up to the date I have mentioned the crews 
of British merchant ships engaged in deep water voyages 
to Australia, to the East Lidies and round the Horn were 
essentially British. The small proportion of foreigners 
which I remember were mostly Scandinavians, and my 
general impression remains that those men were good 
stuff. They appeared always able and ready to do 
their duty by the flag under which they served. The 
majority were Norwegians, whose courage and straight- 
ness of character are matters beyond doubt. I remem- 
ber also a couple of Finns, both carpenters, of course, 
and very good craftsmen; a Swede, the most scientific 
sailmaker I ever met; another Swede, a steward, who 
really might have been called a British seaman since 
he had sailed out of London for over thirty years, a 
rather superior person; one Italian, an everlastingly 
smiling but a pugnacious character; one Frenchman, a 
most excellent sailor, tireless and indomitable under 
very difficult circumstances; one Hollander, whose pla- 
cid manner of looking at the ship going to pieces under 
our feet I shall never forget, and one young, colourless, 
muscularly very strong German, of no particular char- 
acter. Of non-European crews, lascars and Kalashes, 
I have had very little experience, and that was only 
in one steamship and for something less than a year. 
It was on the same occasion that I had my only sight 
of Chinese firemen. Sight is the exact word. One 
didn't speak to them. One saw them going along the 
decks, to and fro, characteristic figures with roUed-up 
pigtails, very dirty when coming off duty and very clean- 
faced when going on duty. They never looked at any- 
body, and one never had occasion to address them 
directly. Their appearances in the light of day were 



182 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

very regular and yet somewhat ghostlike in their 
detachment and silence. 

But of the white crews of British ships and almost 
exclusively British in blood and descent, the immediate 
predecessors of the men whose worth the nation has 
discovered for itself to-day, I have had a thorough 
experience. At first amongst them, then with them, I 
have shared all the conditions of their very special life. 
For it was very special. Li my early days, starting out 
on a voyage was like being launched into Eternity. I 
say advisedly Eternity instead of Space, because of the 
boundless silence which swallowed up one for eighty days 
— for one hundred days — for even yet more days of an 
existence without echoes and whispers. Like Eternity 
itself! For one can't conceive a vocal Eternity. An 
enormous silence, in which there was nothing to connect 
one with the Universe but the incessant wheeling about 
of the sun and other celestial bodies, the alternation of 
light and shadow, eternally chasing each other over the 
sky. The time of the earth, though most carefully re- 
corded by the half -hourly bells, did not count in reality. 

It was a special life, and the men were a very special 
kind of men. By this I don't mean to say they were 
more complex than the generality of mankind. Neither 
were they very much simpler. I have already admitted 
that man is a marvellous creature, and no doubt those 
particular men were marvellous enough in their way. 
But in their collective capacity they can be best defined 
as men who lived under the command to do well, or 
perish utterly. I have written of them with all the 
truth that was in me, and with all the impartiality of 
which I was capable. Let me not be misunderstood in 
this statement. Affection can be very exacting, and 
can easily miss fairness on the critical side. I have 
looked upon them with a jealous eye, expecting perhaps 



WELL DONE 183 

even more than it was strictly fair to expect. And no 
wonder — since I had elected to be one of them very 
deliberately, very completely, without any looking back 
or looking elsewhere. The circumstances were such 
as to give me the feeling of complete identification, a 
very vivid comprehension that if I wasn't one of them 
I was nothing at all. But what was most difficult to de- 
tect was the nature of the deep impulses which these 
men obeyed. What spirit was it that inspired the un- 
failing manifestations of their simple fidelity.? No out- 
ward cohesive force of compulsion or discipline was 
holding them together or had ever shaped their un- 
expressed standards. It was very mysterious. At 
last I came to the conclusion that it must be something 
in the nature of the life itself; the sea-life chosen blindly, 
embraced for the most part accidentally by those men 
who appeared but a loose agglomeration of individuals 
toiling for their living away from the eyes of mankind. 
Who can tell how a tradition comes into the world .^^ We 
are children of the earth. It may be that the noblest 
tradition is but the offspring of material conditions, of 
the hard necessities besetting men's precarious lives. 
But once it has been born it becomes a spirit. Nothing 
can extinguish its force then. Clouds of greedy selfish- 
ness, the subtle dialectics of revolt or fear, may obscure 
it for a time, but in very truth it remains an immortal 
ruler invested with the power of honour and shame. 

II 

The mysteriously born tradition of sea-craft com- 
mands unity in a body of workers engaged in an occu- 
pation in which men have to depend upon each other. 
It raises them, so to speak, above the frailties of their 
dead selves. I don't wish to be suspected of lack of 



184 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

judgment and of blind enthusiasm. I don't claim spe- 
cial morality or even special manliness for the men who 
in my time really lived at sea, and at the present time 
live at any rate mostly at sea. But in their qualities as 
well as in their defects, in their weaknesses as well as in 
their "virtue," there was indubitably something apart. 
They were never exactly of the earth earthly. They 
couldn't be that. Chance or desire (mostly desire) 
had set them apart, often in their very childhood, and 
what is to be remarked is that from the very nature of 
things this early appeal, this early desire, had to be of 
an imaginative kind. Thus their simple minds had a 
sort of sweetness. They were in a way preserved. I 
am not alluding here to the preserving qualities of the 
salt in the sea. The salt of the sea is a very good thing 
in its way ; it preserves for instance one from catching a 
beastly cold while one remains wet for weeks together 
in the "roaring forties." But in sober unpoetical truth 
the sea-salt never gets much further than the seaman's 
skin, which in certain latitudes it takes the opportunity 
to encrust very thoroughly. That and nothing more. 
And then, what is this sea, the subject of so many 
apostrophes in verse and prose addressed to its great- 
ness and its mystery by men who had never pene- 
trated either the one or the other .^^ The sea is 
uncertain, arbitrary, featureless, and violent. Except 
when helped by the varied majesty of the sky, there is 
something inane in its serenity and something stupid in 
its wrath, which is endless, boundless, persistent, and 
futile — a grey, hoary thing raging like an old ogre un- 
certain of its prey. Its very immensity is wearisome. 
At any time within the navigating centuries mankind 
might have addressed it with the words: "What are 
you, after all.^ Oh yes, we know. The greatest scene 
of potential terror, a devouring enigma of space. Yes. 



WELL DONE 185 

But our lives have been nothing if not a continuous 
defiance of what you can do and what you may hold; 
a spiritual and material defiance carried on in our 
plucky cockleshells on and on beyond the successive 
provocations of your unreadable horizons." 

Ah, but the charm of the sea! Oh, yes, charm 
enough. Or rather a sort of unholy fascination as of an 
elusive nymph whose embrace is death, and a Medusa's 
head whose stare is terror. That sort of charm is cal- 
culated to keep men morally in order. But as to sea- 
salt, with its particular bitterness like nothing else 
on earth, that, I am safe to say, penetrates no further 
than the seaman's lips. With them the inner soundness 
is caused by another kind of preservative of which 
(nobody will be surprised to hear) the main ingredient 
is a certain kind of love that has nothing to do with the 
futile smiles and the futile passions of the sea. 

Being love this feeling is naturally naive and imagina- 
tive. It has also in it that strain of fantasy that is so 
often, nay almost invariably, to be found in the tempera- 
ment of a true seaman. But I repeat that I claim no 
particular morality for seamen. I will admit without 
diflSculty that I have found amongst them the usual de- 
fects of mankind, characters not quite straight, un- 
certain tempers, vacillating wills, capriciousness, small 
meannesses; all this coming out mostly on the contact 
with the shore; and all rather naive, peculiar, a little 
fantastic. I have even had a downright thief in my ex- 
perience. One. 

This is indeed a minute proportion, but it might have 
been my luck; and since I am writing in eulogy of sea- 
men I feel irresistibly tempted to talk about this unique 
specimen; not indeed to offer him as an example of 
morality, but to bring out certain characteristics and set 
out a certain point of view. He was a large, strong man 



186 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

with a guileless countenance, not very communicative 
with his shipmates; but when drawn into any sort of 
conversation displaying a very painstaking earnestness. 
He was fair and candid-eyed, of a very satisfactory 
smartness, and, from the officer-of -the- watch point of 
view, — altogether dependable. Then, suddenly, he went 
and stole. And he didn't go away from his honour- 
able kind to do that thing to somebody on shore; he 
stole right there on the spot, in proximity to his ship- 
mates, on board his own ship, with complete disregard 
for old Brown, our night watchman (whose fame for 
trustworthiuess was utterly blasted for the rest of the 
voyage) and in such a way as to bring the profoundest 
possible trouble to all the blameless souls animating 
that ship. He stole eleven golden sovereigns, and a 
gold pocket chronometer and chain. I am really in 
doubt whether the crime should not be entered under 
the category of sacrilege rather than theft. Those 
things belonged to the captain! There was certainly 
something in the nature of the violation of a sanctuary, 
and of a particularly impudent kind, too, because he got 
his plunder out of the captain's state-room while the 
captain was asleep there. But look, now, at the 
fantasy of the man! After going through the pockets 
of the clothes, he did not hasten to retreat. No. He 
went deliberately into the saloon and removed from the 
sideboard two big, heavy, silver-plated lamps, which he 
carried to the fore-end of the ship and stood symmetri- 
cally on the knight-heads. This, I must explain, means 
that he took them away as far as possible from the place 
where they belonged. These were the deeds of dark- 
ness. In the morning the bo'sun came along dragging 
after him a hose to wash the foc'sle head, and, beholding 
the shiny cabin lamps, resplendent in the morning light, 
one on each side of the bowsprit, he was paralysed with 



WELL DONE 187 

awe. He dropped the nozzle from his nerveless hands — 
and such hands, too ! I happened along, and he said to 
me in a distracted whisper, "Look at that, sir, look." 
"Take them back aft at once yourself," I said, very 
amazed, too. As we approached the quarterdeck we 
perceived the steward, a prey to a sort of sacred horror, 
holding up before us the captain's trousers. 

Bronzed men with brooms and buckets in their hands 
stood about with open mouths. "I have found them 
lying in the passage outside the captain's door," the 
steward declared faintly. The additional statement 
that the captain's watch was gone from its hook by the 
bedside raised the painful sensation to the highest pitch. 
We knew then we had a thief amongst us. Our thief! 
Behold the solidarity of a ship's company. He couldn't 
be to us like any other thief. We all had to live under 
the shadow of his crime for days; but the police kept on 
investigating, and one morning a young woman ap- 
peared on board swinging a parasol, attended by two 
policemen, and identified the culprit. She was a bar- 
maid of some bar near the Circular Quay, and knew 
really nothing of our man except that he looked like 
a respectable sailor. She had seen him only twice in her 
life. On the second occasion he begged her nicely as a 
great favour to take care for him of a small solidly tied- 
up paper parcel for a day or two. But he never came 
near her again. At the end of three weeks she opened 
it, and, of course, seeing the contents, was much alarmed, 
and went to the nearest police-station for advice. The 
police took her at once on board our ship, where all 
hands were mustered on the quarterdeck. She stared 
wildly at all our faces, pointed suddenly a finger with a 
shriek, "That's the man," and incontinently went off 
into a fit of hysterics in front of thirty-six seamen. I 
must say that never in my life did I see a ship's company 



188 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

look so frightened. Yes, in this tale of guilt, there was a 
curious absence of mere criminality, and a touch of 
that fantasy which is often a part of a seaman's char- 
acter. It wasn't greed that moved him, I think. It was 
something much less simple: boredom, perhaps, or a 
bet, or the pleasure of defiance. 

And now for the point of view. It was given to me 
by a short, black-bearded A. B. of the crew, who on 
sea passages washed my flannel shirts, mended my 
clothes and generally looked after my room. He 
was an excellent needleman and washerman, and a 
very good sailor. Standing in this peculiar relation to 
me, he considered himself privileged to open his mind 
on the matter one evening when he brought back to my 
cabin three clean and neatly folded shirts. He was 
profoundly pained. He said: "What a ship's com- 
pany! Never seen such a crowd! Liars, cheats, 
thieves . . ." 

It was a needlessly jaundiced view. There were in 
that ship's company three or four fellows who dealt in 
tall yarns, and I knew that on the passage out there had 
been a dispute over a game in the foc'sle once or twice of 
a rather acute kind, so that all card-playing had to be 
abandoned. In regard to thieves, as we know, there 
was only one, and he, I am convinced, came out of his 
reserve to perform an exploit rather than to commit a 
crime. But my black-bearded friend's indignation had 
its special morality, for he added, with a burst of pas- 
sion: "And on board our ship, too — a ship like 
this . . ." 

Therein lies the secret of the seamen's special charac- 
ter as a body. The ship, this ship, our ship, the ship we 
serve, is the moral symbol of our life. A ship has to be 
respected, actually and ideally; her merit, her innocence, 
are sacred things. Of all the creations of man she is the 



WELL DONE 189 

closest partner of his toil and courage. From every 
point of view it is imperative that you should do well by 
her. And, as always in the case of true love, all you 
can do for her adds only to the tale of her merits in your 
heart. Mute and compelling, she claims not only your 
fidelity, but your respect. And the supreme "Well 
done!" which you may earn is made over to her. 

Ill 

It is my deep conviction, or, perhaps, I ought to say 
my deep feeling born from personal experience, that it 
is not the sea but the ships of the sea that guide and 
command that spirit of adventure which some say is the 
second nature of British men. I don't want to provoke 
a controversy (for intellectually I am rather a Quietist) 
but I venture to affirm that the main characteristic of 
the British men spread all over the world, is not the 
spirit of adventure so much as the spirit of service. I 
think that this could be demonstrated from the history 
of great voyages and the general activity of the race. 
That the British man has always liked his service to be 
adventurous rather than otherwise cannot be denied, 
for each British man began by being young in his time 
when all risk has a glamour. Afterwards, with the 
course of years, risk became a part of his daily work; he 
would have missed it from his side as one misses a 
loved companion. 

The mere love of adventure is no saving grace. It is 
no grace at all. It lays a man under no obligation 
of faithfulness to an idea and even to his own self. 
Roughly speaking, an adventurer may be expected to 
have courage, or at any rate may be said to need it. But 
courage in itself is not an ideal. A successful highway- 
man showed courage of a sort, and pirate crews have 



190 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

been known to fight with courage or perhaps only with 
reckless desperation in the manner of cornered rats. 
There is nothing in the world to prevent a mere lover or 
pursuer of adventure from running at any moment. 
There is his own self, his mere taste for excitement, the 
prospect of some sort of gain, but there is no sort of 
loyalty to bind him in honour to consistent conduct. 
I have noticed that the majority of mere lovers of ad- 
venture are mightily careful of their skins; and the 
proof of it is that so many of them manage to keep it 
whole to an advanced age. You find them in mysteri- 
ous nooks of islands and continents, mostly red-nosed 
and watery-eyed, and not even amusingly boastful. 
There is nothing more futile under the sun than a mere 
adventurer. He might have loved at one time — which 
would have been a saving grace. I mean loved adven- 
ture for itself. But if so, he was bound to lose this 
grace very soon. Adventure by itself is but a phantom, 
a dubious shape without a heart. Yes, there is noth- 
ing more futile than an adventurer, but nobody can 
say that the adventurous activities of the British race 
are stamped with the futility of a chase after mere 
emotions. 

The successive generations that went out to sea 
from these Isles went out to toil desperately in ad- 
venturous conditions. A man is a worker. If he is not 
that he is nothing. Just nothing — like a mere ad- 
venturer. Those men understood the nature of their 
work, but more or less dimly, in various degrees of im- 
perfection. The best and greatest of their leaders even 
had never seen it clearly, because of its magnitude and 
the remoteness of its end. This is the common fate of 
mankind, whose most positive achievements are born 
from dreams and visions followed loyally to an unknown 
destination. And it doesn't matter. For the great 



WELL DONE 191 

mass of mankind the only saving grace that is needed 
is steady fidelity to what is nearest to hand and 
heart in the short moment of each human efiPort. In 
other and in greater words, what is needed is a sense 
of immediate duty, and a feeling of impalpable con- 
straint. Indeed, seamen and duty are all the time 
inseparable companions. It has been suggested to me 
that this sense of duty is not a patriotic sense or a 
religious sense, or even a social sense in a seaman. I 
don't know. It seems to me that a seaman's duty 
may be an unconscious compound of these three, some- 
thing perhaps smaller than either, but something much 
more definite for the simple mind and more adapted 
to the humbleness of the seaman's task. It has been 
suggested also to me that this impalpable constraint 
is put upon the nature of a seaman by the Spirit of the 
Sea, which he serves with a dumb and dogged devotion. 

Those are fine words conveying a fine idea. But this 
I do know, that it is very difficult to display a dogged 
devotion to a mere spirit, however great. In every- 
day life ordinary men require something much more 
material, effective, definite, and symbolic on which to 
concentrate their love and their devotion. And then, 
what is it, this Spirit of the Sea.^^ It is too great and too 
elusive to be embraced and taken to a human breast. 
All that a guileless or guileful seaman knows of it is its 
hostility, its exaction of toil as endless as its ever-re- 
newed horizons. No. AYhat awakens the seaman's 
sense of duty, what lays that impalpable constraint 
upon the strength of his manliness, what commands his 
not always dumb if always dogged devotion, is not the 
spirit of the sea but something that in his eyes has a 
body, a character, a fascination, and almost a soul — it 
is his ship. 

There is not a day that has passed for many centuries 



192 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

now without the sun seeing scattered over all the seas 
groups of British men whose material and moral exist- 
ence is conditioned by their loyalty to each other and 
their faithful devotion to a ship. 

Each age has sent its contingent, not of sons (for the 
great mass of seamen have always been a childless lot) 
but of loyal and obscure successors taking up the 
modest but spiritual inheritance of a hard life and sim- 
ple duties; of duties so simple that nothing ever could 
shake the traditional attitude bom from the physical 
conditions of the service. It was always the ship, 
bound on any possible errand in the service of the 
nation, that has been the stage for the exercise of 
seamen's primitive virtues. The dimness of great 
distances and the obscurity of lives protected them 
from the nation's admiring gaze. Those scattered 
distant ships' companies seemed to the eyes of the 
earth only one degree removed (on the right side, I 
suppose) from the other strange monsters of the deep. 
If spoken of at all they were spoken of in tones of half- 
contemptuous indulgence. A good many years ago it 
was my lot to write about one of those ships' companies 
on a certain sea, under certain circumstances, in a book 
of no particular length. 

That small group of men whom I tried to limn with 
loving care, but sparing none of their weaknesses, was 
characterised by a friendly reviewer as a lot of engaging 
ruffians. This gave me some food for thought. Was 
it, then, in that guise that they appeared through the 
mists of the sea, distant, perplexed, and simple-minded.^ 
And what on earth is an "engaging ruffian? " He must 
be a creature of literary imagination, I thought, for the 
two words don't match in my personal experience. It 
has happened to me to meet a few ruffians here and there, 
but I never found one of them "engaging." I consoled 



WELL DONE 193 

myself, however, by the reflection that the friendly 
reviewer must have been talking like a parrot, which so 
often seems to understand what it says. 

Yes, in the mists of the sea, and in their remoteness 
from the rest of the race, the shapes of those men 
appeared distorted, uncouth and faint, so faint as to be 
almost invisible. It needed the lurid light of the en- 
gines of war to bring them out into full view, very 
simple, without worldly graces, organised now into a 
body of workers by the genius of one of themselves, 
who gave them a place and a voice in the social scheme; 
but in the main still apart in their homeless, childless 
generations, scattered in loyal groups over all the seas, 
giving faithful care to their ships and serving the 
nation, which, since they are seamen, can give them no 
reward but the supreme "Well Done." 



^t 



TRADITION 

1918 

"Work is the law. Like iron that lying idle de- 
generates into a mass of useless rust, like water that 
in an unruffled pool sickens into a stagnant and corrupt 
state, so without action the spirit of men turns to a dead 
thing, loses its force, ceases prompting us to leave some 
trace of ourselves on this earth. " The sense of the above 
lines does not belong to me. It may be found in the 
note-books of one of the greatest artists that ever lived, 
Leonardo da Vinci. It has a simplicity and a truth 
which no amount of subtle comment can destroy. 

The Master who had meditated so deeply on the 
rebirth of arts and sciences, on the inward beauty of all 
things, — ships' lines, women's faces — and on the visible 
aspects of nature was profoundly right in his pro- 
nouncement on the work that is done on the earth. 
From the hard work of men are born the sympathetic 
consciousness of a common destiny, the fidelity to 
right practice which makes great craftsmen, the sense 
of right conduct which we may call honour, the devotion 
to our calling and the idealism which is not a misty, 
winged angel without eyes, but a divine figure of 
terrestrial aspect with a clear glance and with its feet 
resting firmly on the earth on which it was born. 

And work will overcome all evil, except ignorance, 
which is the condition of humanity and, like the ambient 
air, fills the space between the various sorts and con- 
ditions of men, which breeds hatred, fear, and contempt 

194 



TRADITION 195 

between the masses of mankind and puts on men's lips, 
on their innocent Hps, words that are thoughtless and 
vain. 

Thoughtless, for instance, were the words that (in all 
innocence, I believe) came on the lips of a prominent 
statesman making in the House of Commons an 
eulogistic reference to the British Merchant Service. 
In this name I include men of diverse status and origin, 
who live on and by the sea, by it exclusively, outside all 
professional pretensions and social formulas, men for 
whom not only their daily bread but their collective 
character, their personal achievement and their in- 
dividual merit come from the sea. Those words of the 
statesman were meant kindly; but, after all, this is not a 
complete excuse. Rightly or wrongly, we expect from a 
man of national importance a larger, and at the same 
time a more scrupulous precision of speech, for it is 
possible that it may go echoing down the ages. His 
words were: 

" It is right when thinking of the Navy not to forget 
the men of the Merchant Service, who have shown — 
and it is more surprising because they have had no 
traditions towards it — courage as great," etc. etc. 

And then he went on talking of the execution of 
Captain Fryatt, an event of undying memory, but less 
connected with the permanent, unchangeable conditions 
of sea service than with the wrong view German minds 
delight in taking of Englishmen's psychology. The 
enemy, he said, meant by this atrocity to frighten our 
sailors away from the sea. 

" What has happened.'^ " he goes on to ask. " Never at 
any time in peace have sailors stayed so short a time 
ashore or shown such a readiness to step again into a 
ship." 

Which means, in other words, that they answered to 



196 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

the call. I should like to know at what time of history 
the English Merchant Service, the great body of mer- 
chant seamen, had failed to answer the call. Noticed or 
unnoticed, ignored or commended, they have answered 
invariably the call to do their work, the very conditions 
of which made them what they are. They have always 
served the nation's needs through their own invariable 
fidelity to the demands of their special life; but with the 
development and complexity of material civilisation 
they grew less prominent to the nation's eye among all 
the vast schemes of national industry. Never was the 
need greater and the call to the service more urgent than 
to-day. And those inconspicuous workers on whose 
qualities depends so much of the national welfare have 
answered it without dismay, facing risk without glory, 
in the perfect faithfulness to that tradition which the 
speech of the statesman denies to them at the very 
moment when he thinks fit to praise their courage . . . 
and mention his surprise! 

The hour of opportunity has struck — ^not for the 
first time — for the Merchant Service; and if I associate 
myself with all my heart in the admiration and the 
praise which is the greatest reward of brave men I must 
be excused from joining in any sentiment of surprise. 
It is perhaps because I have not been born to the in- 
heritance of that tradition, which has yet fashioned the 
fundamental part of my character in my young days, 
that I am so consciously aware of it and venture to 
vindicate its existence in this outspoken manner. 

Merchant seamen have always been what they are 
now, from their earliest days, before the Royal 
Navy had been fashioned out of the material they 
furnished for the hands of kings and statesmen. Their 
work has made them, as work undertaken with single- 
minded devotion makes men, giving to their achieve- 



TRADITION 197 

ments that vitality and continuity in which their souls 
are expressed, tempered and matured through the 
succeeding generations. In its simplest definition the 
work of merchant seamen has been to take ships en- 
trusted to their care from port to port across the seas; 
and, from the highest to the lowest, to watch and 
labour with devotion for the safety of the property and 
the lives committed to their skill and fortitude through 
the hazards of innumerable voyages. 

That was always the clear task, the single aim, the 
simple ideal, the only problem for an unselfish solution. 
The terms of it have changed with the years, its risks 
have worn different aspects from time to time. There 
are no longer any unexplored seas. Human ingenuity 
has devised better means to meet the dangers of natural 
forces. But it is always the same problem. The 
youngsters who were growing up at sea at the end of my 
service are commanding ships now. At least I have 
heard of some of them who do. And whatever the 
shape and power of their ships the character of the duty 
remains the same. A mine or a torpedo that strikes 
your ship is not so very different from a sharp, un- 
charted rock tearing her life out of her in another way. 
At a greater cost of vital energy, under the well-nigh 
intolerable stress of vigilance and resolution, they are 
doing steadily the work of their professional forefathers 
in the midst of multiplied dangers. They go to and fro 
across the oceans on their everlasting task: the same 
men, the same stout hearts, the same fidelity to an 
exacting tradition created by simple toilers who in their 
time knew how to live and die at sea. 

Allowed to share in this work and in this tradition for 
something like twenty years, I am bold enough to think 
that perhaps I am not altogether unworthy to speak of 
it. It was the sphere not only of my activity but, I 



198 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

may safely say, also my aflFections; but after such a close 
connection it is very difficult to avoid l)ringin<^ in one's 
owTi personality. Without looking at all at the aspects 
of the Labour problem, I can safely affirm that I have 
never, never seen British seamen refuse any risk, any 
exertion, any eiTort of spirit or body up to tJie extremest 
demands of their calling. Years ago — it seems ages 
ago — I have seen the crew of a British ship fight the fire 
in the cargo for a whole slet^pless week and tJien, witJi 
her decks blo\^Ti up, I have seen tJiem still continue tiie 
fight to save the floating shell. And at last I have seen 
them refuse to be taken off by a vessel standing by, and 
this only in order "to see tJie last of our ship," at tlie 
word, at the simple word, of a man who commanded 
them, a wortliy soul indeed, but of no heroic aspect. 
I have seen that. I have shared their days in small 
boats. Hard days. Ages ago. And now let me men- 
tion a story of to-day. 

I will try to relate it here mainly in the words of the 
chief engineer of a certain steamship which, after bunk- 
ering, left Lerwick bound for Iceland. The weather 
was cold, the sea pretty rough, with a stiff head wind. 
All went well till next day, about 1.30 r. m., then the 
captain sighted a suspicious object far away to star- 
board. Speed was increased at once to close in with 
the Faroes and good-look outs were set fore and aft. 
Nothing further was seen of the suspicious object, but 
about half -past three without any warning the ship was 
struck amidships by a torpedo which exploded in the 
bunkers. None of the crew was injured by the ex- 
plosion, and all hands, without exception, behaved 
admirably. 

The chief oflScer with his watch managed to lower the 
No. 3 boat. Two other boats had been shattered by 
the explosion, and though another lifeboat was cleared 



TRADITION 199 

and ready, there was no time to lower it, and "some of 
us jumped while others were washed overboard. Mean- 
time the captain had been busy handing lifebelts to the 
men and cheering them up with words and smiles, with 
no thought of his own safety." The ship went down in 
less than four minutes. The captain was the last man 
on board, going down with her, and was sucked under. 
On coming up he was caught under an upturned boat to 
which five hands were clinging. "One lifeboat," says 
the -chief engineer, "which was floating empty in the 
distance was cleverly manoeuvred to our assistance by 
the steward, who swam off to her pluckily. Our next 
endeavour was to release the captain, who was en- 
tangled under the boat. As it was impossible to right 
her, we set to split her side open with the boat hook, 
because by awful bad luck the head of the axe we had 
flew off at the first blow and was lost. The rescue took 
thirty minutes, and the extricated captain was in a 
pitiable condition, being badly bruised and having 
swallowed a lot of salt water. He was unconscious. 
While at that work the submarine came to the surface 
quite close and made a complete circle round us, the 
seven men that we counted on the conning tower laugh- 
ing at our efforts. 

"There were eighteen of us saved. I deeply regret 
the loss of the chief officer, a fine fellow and a kind ship- 
mate showing splendid promise. The other men lost — 
one A. B., one greaser, and two firemen — were quiet, 
conscientious, good fellows." 

With no restoratives in the boat, they endeavoured 
to bring the captain round by means of massage. Mean- 
time the oars were got out in order to reach the Faroes, 
which were about thirty miles dead to windward, but 
after about nine hours' hard work they had to desist, 
and, putting out a sea-anchor, they took shelter under 



200 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

the canvas boat-cover from the cold wind and torrential 
rain. Says the narrator: "We were all very wet and 
miserable, and decided to have two biscuits all round. 
The effects of this and being under the shelter of the 
canvas warmed us up and made us feel pretty well con- 
tented. At about sunrise the captain showed signs of 
recovery, and by the time the sun was up he was looking 
a lot better, much to our relief." 

After being informed of what had been done the 
revived captain "dropped a bombshell in our midst," 
by proposing to make for the Shetlands, which were only 
one hundred and fifty miles off. "The wind is in our 
favour," he said. "I promise to take you there. Are you 
all willing ^ ' ' This — comments the chief engineer — * * from 
a man who but a few hours previously had been hauled 
back from the grave ! " The captain's confident manner 
inspired the men, and they all agreed. Under the best 
possible conditions a boat-run of one hundred and fifty 
miles in the North Atlantic and in winter weather would 
have been a feat of no mean merit, but in the circum- 
stances it required uncommon nerve and skill to carry 
out such a promise. With an oar for a mast and the 
boat-cover cut down for a sail they started on their 
dangerous journey, with the boat compass and the stars 
for their guide. The captain's undaunted serenity 
buoyed them all up against despondency. He told 
them what point he was making for. It was Ronas 
Hill "and we struck it as straight as a die." 

The chief engineer commends also the ship steward 
for the manner in which he made the little food they had 
last, the cheery spirit he manifested, and the great help 
he was to the captain by keeping the men in good 
humour. That trusty man had "his hands cruelly 
chafed with the rowing, but it never damped his spirits." 

They made Ronas Hill (as straight as a die), and the 



TRADITION 201 

chief engineer cannot express their feelings of gratitude 
and rehef when they set their feet on the shore. He 
praises the unbounded kindness of the people in Hills- 
wick. "It seemed to us all like Paradise regained," 
he says, concluding his letter with the words: 

"And there was our captain, just his usual self, as 
if nothing had happened, as if bringing the boat that 
hazardous journey and being the means of saving 
eighteen souls was to him an everyday occurrence." 

Such is the chief engineer's testimony to the con- 
tinuity of the old tradition of the sea, which made by 
the work of men has in its turn created for them their 
simple ideal of conduct. - 



CONFIDENCE 

1919 

I 

The seamen hold up the Edifice. They have been 
holding it up in the past and they will hold it up in the 
future, whatever this future may contain of logical de- 
velopment, of unforeseen new shapes, of great prom- 
ises and of dangers still unknown. 

It is not an unpardonable stretching of the truth to 
say that the British Empire rests on transportation. I 
am speaking now naturally of the sea, as a man who has 
lived on it for many years, at a time, too, when on 
sighting a vessel on the horizon of any of the great 
oceans it was perfectly safe to bet any reasonable odds 
on her being a British ship — with the certitude of mak- 
ing a pretty good thing of it at the end of the voyage. 

I have tried to convey here in popular terms the 
strong impression remembered from my young days. 
The Red Ensign prevailed on the high seas to such an 
extent that one always experienced a slight shock on 
seeing some other combination of colours blow out at 
the peak or flag-pole of any chance encounter in deep 
water. In the long run the persistence of the visual 
fact forced upon the mind a half -unconscious sense of its 
inner significance. We have all heard of the well- 
known view that trade follows the flag. And that is not 
always true. There is also this truth that the flag, in 
normal conditions, represents commerce to the eye and 
understanding of the average man. This is a truth, but 
it is not the whole truth. In its numbers and in its 

202 



CONFIDENCE 203 

unfailing ubiquity, the British Red Ensign, under 
which naval actions too have been fought, adventures 
entered upon and sacrifices offered, represented in fact 
something more than the prestige of a great trade. 

The flutter of that piece of red bunting showered 
sentiment on the nations of the earth. I will not ven- 
ture to say that in every case that sentiment was of a 
friendly nature. Of hatred, half concealed or con- 
cealed not at all, this is not the place to speak, and in- 
deed the little I have seen of it about the world was 
tainted with stupidity and seemed to confess in its very 
violence the extreme poorness of its case. But gener- 
ally it was more in the nature of envious wonder quali- 
fied by a half -concealed admiration. 

That flag, which but for the Union Jack in the corner 
might have been adopted by the most radical of revolu- 
tions, affirmed in its numbers the stability of purpose, 
the continuity of effort, and the greatness of Britain's 
opportunity pursued steadily in the order and peace of 
the world : that world which for twenty-five years or so 
after 1870 may be said to have been living in holy calm 
and hushed silence with only now and then a slight 
clink of metal, as if in some distant part of mankind's 
habitation some restless body had stumbled over a heap 
of old armour. 

II 

We who have learned by now what a world-war is like 
may be excused for considering the disturbances of that 
period as insignificant brawls, mere hole-and-corner 
scuffles. In the world, which memory depicts as so 
wonderfully tranquil all over, it was the sea yet that was 
the safest place. And the Red Ensign, commercial, in- 
dustrial, historic, pervaded the sea! Assertive only by 
its numbers, highly significant, and, under its char- 



204 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

acter of a trade emblem, nationally expressive, it was 
symbolic of old and new ideas, of conservatism and 
progress, of routine and enterprise, of drudgery and 
adventure — and of a certain easy-going optimism that 
would have appeared the Father of Sloth itself if it had 
not been so stubbornly, so everlastingly active. 

The unimaginative, hard-working men, great and 
small, who served this flag afloat and ashore, nursed 
dumbly a mysterious sense of its greatness. It 
sheltered magnificently their vagabond labours under 
the sleepless eye of the sun. It held up the Edifice. 
But it crowned it too. This is not the extravagance of 
a mixed metaphor. It is the sober expression of a not 
very complex truth. Within that double fimction the 
national life that flag represented so well went on in 
safety, assured of its daily crust of bread for which we 
all pray and without which we would have to give up 
faith, hope and charity, the intellectual conquests of our 
minds and the sanctified strength of our labouring arms. 
I may permit myself to speak of it in these terms be- 
cause as a matter of fact it was on that very symbol that 
I had founded my life and (as I have said elsewhere in a 
moment of outspoken gratitude) had known for many 
years no other roof above my head. 

In those days that symbol was not particularly re- 
garded. Superficially and definitely it represented but 
one of the forms of national activity rather remote from 
the close-knit organisations of other industries, a kind 
of toil not immediately under the public eye. It was of 
its Navy that the nation, looking out of the windows of 
its world-wide Edifice, was proudly aware. And that 
was but fair. The Navy is the armed man at the gate. 
An existence depending upon the sea must be guarded 
with a jealous, sleepless vigilance, for the sea is but a 
fickle friend. 



CONFIDENCE 205 

It had provoked conflicts, encouraged ambitions, and 
had lured some nations to destruction — as we know. 
He — man or people — who, boasting of long years of 
familiarity with the sea, neglects the strength and 
cunning of his right hand is a fool. The pride and 
trust of the nation in its Navy so strangely mingled 
with moments of neglect, caused by a particularly 
thick-headed idealism, is perfectly justified. It is also 
very proper : for it is good for a body of men conscious 
of a' great responsibility to feel themselves recognised, if 
only in that fallible, imperfect and often irritating way 
in which recognition is sometimes offered to the de- 
serving. 

But the Merchant Service had never to suffer from 
that sort of irritation. No recognition was thrust on it 
offensively, and, truth to say, it did not seem to concern 
itself imduly with the claims of its own obscure merit. 
It had no consciousness. It had no words. It had no 
time. To these busy men their work was but the 
ordinary labour of earning a living; their duties in their 
ever-recurring round had, like the sun itself, the com- 
monness of daily things; their individual fidelity was 
not so much united as merely co-ordinated by an aim 
that shone with no spiritual lustre. They were every- 
day men. They were that, eminently. When the 
great opportunity came to them to link arms in re- 
sponse to a supreme call they received it with character- 
istic simplicity, incorporating self-sacrifice into the 
texture of their common task, and, as far as emotion 
went, framing the horror of mankind's catastrophic 
time within the rigid rules of their professional con- 
science. And who can say that they could have done 
better than this.^ 

Such was their past both remote and near. It has 
been stubbornly consistent, and as this consistency was 



g06 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

based upon the character of men fashioned by a very 
old tradition, there is no doubt that it will endure. Such 
changes as came into the sea life have been for the main 
part mechanical and affecting only the material con- 
ditions of that inbred consistency. That men don't 
change is a profound truth. They don't change be- 
cause it is not necessary for them to change even if they 
could accomplish that miracle. It is enough for them 
to be infinitely adaptable — as the last four years have 
abundantly proved. 

Ill 

Thus one may await the future without undue excite- 
ment and with unshaken confidence. Whether the 
hues of sunrise are angry or benign, gorgeous or sinister, 
we shall always have the same sky over our heads. Yet 
by a kindly dispensation of Providence the human 
faculty of astonishment will never lack food. What 
could be more surprising for instance, than the calm 
invitation to Great Britain to discard the force and 
protection of its Navy.^* It has been suggested, it has 
been proposed — I don't know whether it has been 
pressed. Probably not much. For if the excursions of 
audacious folly have no bounds that human eye can see, 
reason has the habit of never straying very far away 
from its throne. 

It is not the first time in history that excited voices 
have been heard urging the warrior still panting from 
the fray to fling his tried weapons on the altar of peace, 
for they would be needed no more! And such voices 
have been, in undying hope or extreme weariness, 
listened to sometimes. But not for long. After all, 
every sort of shouting is a transitory thing. It is the 
grim silence of facts that remains. 



CONFIDENCE 207 

The British Merchant Service has been challenged in 
its supremacy before. It will be challenged again. It 
may be even asked menacingly in the name of some 
humanitarian doctrine or some empty ideal to step 
down voluntarily from that place which it has managed 
to keep for so many years. But I imagine that it will 
take more than words of brotherly love or brotherly 
anger (which, as is well known, is the worst kind of 
anger) to drive British seamen, armed or unarmed, 
from the seas. Firm in this indestructible if not easily 
explained conviction, I can allow myself to think 
placidly of that long, long future which I shall not see. 

My confidence rests on the hearts of men who do not 
change, though they may forget many things for a time 
and even forget to be themselves in a moment of false 
enthusiasm. But of that I am not afraid. It will not 
be for long. I know the men. Through the kindness 
of the Admiralty (which, let me confess here in a white 
sheet, I repaid by the basest ingratitude) I was per- 
mitted during the war to renew my contact with the 
British seamen of the merchant service. It is to their 
generosity in recognising me under the shore rust of 
twenty-five years as one of themselves that I owe one 
of the deepest emotions of my life. Never for a mo- 
ment did I feel among them like an idle, wandering 
ghost from a distant past. They talked to me seriously, 
openly, and with professional precision, of facts, of 
events, of implements, I had never heard of in my 
time; but the hands I grasped were like the hands of the 
generation which had trained my youth and is now no 
more. I recognised the character of their glances, the 
accent of their voices. Their moving tales of modem 
instances were presented to me with that peculiar turn 
of mind flavoured by the inherited humour and sagacity 
of the sea. I don't know what the seaman of the future 



208 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

will be like. He may have to live all his days with a 
telephone tied up to his head and bristle all over with 
scientific antennae like a figure in a fantastic tale. But 
he will always be the man revealed to us lately, immut- 
able in his slight variations like the closed path of this 
planet of ours on which he must find his exact position 
once, at the very least, in every twenty -four hours. 

The greatest desideratum of a sailor's life is to be 
"certain of his position." It is a source of great worry 
at times, but I don't think that it need be so at this time. 
Yet even the best position has its dangers on account of 
the fickleness of the elements. But I think that, left 
untrammelled to the individual effort of its creators and 
to the collective spirit of its servants, the British Mer- 
chant Service will manage to maintain its position on 
this restless and watery globe. 



FLIGHT 

1917 

To BEGIN at the end, I will say that the "landing" 
surprised me by a slight and very characteristic "dead" 
sort of shock. 

I may fairly call myself an amphibious creature. A 
good half of my active existence has been passed in 
familiar contact with salt water, and I was aware, 
theoretically, that water is not an elastic body : but it 
was only then that I acquired the absolute conviction of 
the fact. I remember distinctly the thought flashing 
through my head : " By Jove ! it isn't elastic ! " Such is 
the illuminating force of a particular experience. 

This landing (on the water of the North Sea) was 
effected in a Short biplane after one hour and twenty 
minutes in the air. I reckon every minute like a miser 
counting his hoard, for, if what I've got is mine, I am 
not likely now to increase the tale. That feeling is the 
effect of age. It strikes me as I write that, when next 
time I leave the surface of this globe, it won't be to soar 
bodily above it in the air. Quite the contrary. And I 
am not thinking of a submarine either. . . . 

But let us drop this dismal strain and go back 
logically to the beginning. I must confess that I 
started on that flight in a state — I won't say of fury, but 
of a most intense irritation. I don't remember ever 
feeling so annoyed in my life. 

It came about in this way. Two or three days before, 
I had been invited to lunch at an R. N. A. S. station, and 

209 



210 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

was made to feel very much at home by the nicest lot of 
quietly interesting young men it had ever been my good 
fortune to meet. Then I was taken into the sheds. I 
walked respectfully round and round a lot of ma- 
chines of all kinds, and the more I looked at them the 
more I felt somehow that for all the effect they produced 
on me they might have been so many land-vehicles of an 
eccentric design. So I said to Commander O., who 
very kindly was conducting me, "This is all very fine, 
but to realise what one is looking at, one must have 
been up." 

He said at once: "I'll give vou a flight to-morrow 
if you like." 

I postulated that it should be none of those "ten 
minutes in the air" affairs. I wanted a real business 
flight. Commander O. assured me that I would get 
"awfully bored," but I declared that I was willing to 
take that risk. " Very well," he said. " Eleven o'clock 
to-morrow. Don't be late." 

I am sorry to say I was about two minutes late, which 
was enough, however, for Commander O. to greet me 
with a shout from a great distance, "Oh! You are 
coming, then!" 

"Of course I am coming," I yelled indignantly. 

He hurried up to me. "All right. There's your 
machine, and here's your pilot. Come along." 

A lot of officers closed round me, rushed me into a 
hut: two of them began to button me into the coat, 
two more were ramming a cap on my head, others stood 
around with goggles, with binoculars. ... I couldn't 
understand the necessity of such haste. We weren't 
going to chase Fritz. There was no sign of Fritz any- 
where in the blue. Those dear boys did not seem to 
notice my age — fifty-eight, if a day — nor my infirmities 
— a gouty subject for years. This disregard was very 



FLIGHT 211 

flattering, and I tried to live up to it, but the pace 
seemed to me terrific. They galloped me across a vast 
expanse of open ground to the water's edge. 

The machine on its carriage seemed as big as a cot- 
tage, and much more imposing. My young pilot went 
up like a bird. There was an idle, able-bodied ladder 
loafing against a shed within fifteen feet of me, but as 
nobody seemed to notice it, I recommended myself 
mentally to Heaven and started climbing after the 
pilot. The close view of the real fragility of that rigid 
structure startled me considerably, while Commander 
O. discomposed me still more by shouting repeatedly: 
"Don't put your foot there!" I didn't know where to 
put my foot. There was a slight crack; I heard some 
swear-words below me, and then with a supreme effort 
I rolled in and dropped into a basket-chair, absolutely 
winded. A small crowd of mechanics and officers were 
looking up at me from the ground, and while I gasped 
visibly I thought to myself that they would be sure to 
put it down to sheer nervousness. But I hadn't breath 
enough in my body to stick my head out and shout 
down to them: 

"You know, it isn't that at all!" 

Generally I try not to think of my age and infirmities. 
They are not a cheerful subject. But I was never so 
angry and disgusted with them as during that minute 
or so before the machine took the water. As to my 
feelings in the air, those who will read these lines will 
know their own, which are so much nearer the mind 
and the heart than any writings of an unprofessional 
can be. At first all my faculties were absorbed and as 
if neutralized by the sheer novelty of the situation. 
The first to emerge was the sense of security so much 
more perfect than in any small boat I've ever been in; 
the, as it were, material, stillness, and immobility 



212 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

(though it was a bumpy day). I very soon ceased to 
hear the roar of the wind and engines — unless, indeed, 
some cylinders missed, when I became acutely aware 
of that. Within the rigid spread of the powerful planes, 
so strangely motionless, I had sometimes the illusion of 
sitting as if by enchantment in a block of suspended 
marble. Even while looking over at the aeroplane's 
shadow running prettily over land and sea, I had the 
impression of extreme slowness. I imagine that had 
she suddenly nose-dived out of control, I would have 
gone to the final smash without a single additional 
heartbeat. I am sure I would not have known. It 
is doubtless otherwise with the man in control. 

But there was no dive, and I returned to earth (after 
an hour and twenty minutes) without having felt 
"bored" for a single second. I descended (by the 
ladder) thinking that I would never go flying again. 
No, never any more — lest its mysterious fascination, 
whose invisible wing had brushed my heart up there, 
should change to unavailing regret in a man too old for 
its glory. 



SOME REFLECTIONS 
ON THE LOSS OF THE TITANIC 

1912 

It is with a certain bitterness that one must admit to 
oneself that the late S. S. Titanic had a "good press." 
It is perhaps because I have no great practice of daily 
newspapers (I have never seen so many of them to- 
gether lying about my room) that the white spaces and 
the big lettering of the headlines have an incongruously 
festive air to my eyes, a disagreeable effect of a feverish 
exploitation of a sensational God-send. And if ever a 
loss at sea fell under the definition, in the terms of a 
bill of lading, of Act of God, this one does, in its mag- 
nitude, suddenness and severity; and in the chastening 
influence it should have on the self-confidence of man- 
kind. 

I say this with all the seriousness the occasion de- 
mands, though I have neither the competence nor the 
wish to take a theological view of this great misfortune, 
sending so many souls to the irlast account. It is but 
a natural reflection. Another one flowing also from 
the phraseology of bills of lading (a bill of lading is a 
shipping document limiting in certain of its clauses the 
liability of the carrier) is that the "King's Enemies" of 
a more or less overt sort are not altogether sorry that 
this fatal mishap should strike the prestige of the 
greatest Merchant Service of the world. I believe that 
not a thousand miles from these shores certain public 
prints have betrayed in gothic letters their satisfaction 
— to speak plainly — by rather ill-natured comments. 

£13 



214 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

In what light one is to look at the action of the 
American Senate is more difficult to say. From a cer- 
tain point of view the sight of the august senators of a 
great Power rushing to New York and beginning to 
bully and badger the luckless "Yamsi" — on the very 
quay-side so to speak — seems to furnish the Shake- 
spearian touch of the comic to the real tragedy of the 
fatuous drowning of all these people who to the last 
moment put their trust in mere bigness, in the reckless 
affirmations of commercial men and mere technicians 
and in the irresponsible paragraphs of the newspapers 
booming these ships! Yes, a grim touch of comedy. 
One asks oneself what these men are after, with this very 
provincial display of authority. I beg my friends in 
the United States pardon for calling these zealous 
senators men. I don't wish to be disrespectful. They 
may be of the stature of demi-gods for all I know but 
at that great distance from the shores of effete Europe 
and in the presence of so many guileless dead, their 
size seems diminished from this side. What are they 
after.? What is there for them to find out? We know 
what had happened. The ship scraped her side against 
a piece of ice, and sank after floating for two hours 
and a half, taking a lot of people down with her. What 
more can they find out from the unfair badgering of the 
unhappy "Yamsi," or the ruffianly abuse of the same. 

"Yamsi," I should explain, is a mere code address, 
and I use it here symbolically. I have seen commerce 
pretty close. I know what it is worth, and I have 
no particular regard for commercial magnates, but one 
must protest against these Bumble-like proceedings. 
Is it indignation at the loss of so many lives which is 
at work here? Well, the American railroads kill very 
many people during one single year, I dare say. Then 
why don't these dignitaries come down on the presi- 



THE LOSS OF THE TITANIC 215 

dents of their own railroads, of which one can't say 
whether they are mere means of transportation or a 
sort of gambhng game for the use of American pluto- 
crats. Is it only an ardent and, upon the whole, praise- 
worthy desire for information? But the reports of the 
inquiry tell us that the august senators, though raising 
a lot of questions testifying to the complete innocence 
and even blankness of their minds, are unable to under- 
stand what the second officer is saying to them. We 
are iso informed by the press from the other side. Even 
such a simple expression as that one of the look-out men 
was stationed in the "eyes of the ship" was too much 
for the senators of the land of graphic expression. What 
it must have been in the more recondite matters I won't 
even try to think, because I have no mind for smiles 
just now. They were greatly exercised about the 
sound of explosions heard when half the ship was under 
water already. Was there one? Were there two? 
They seemed to be smelling a rat there ! Has not some 
charitable soul told them (what even schoolboys 
who read sea stories know) that when a ship sinks 
from a leak like this, a deck or two is always blown up; 
and that when a steamship goes down by the head, the 
boilers may, and often do break adrift with a sound 
which resembles the sound of an explosion? And they 
may, indeed, explode, for all I know. In the only case 
I have seen of a steamship sinking there was such a 
sound, but I didn't dive down after her to investigate. 
She was not of 45,000 tons and declared unsinkable, 
but the sight was impressive enough. I shall never 
forget the muffled, mysterious detonation, the sudden 
agitation of the sea round the slowly raised stern, and 
to this day I have in my eye the propeller, seen per- 
fectly still in its frame against a clear evening sky. 
But perhaps the second officer has explained to them 



216 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

by this time this and a few other Httle facts. Though 
why an officer of the British Merchant Service should 
answer the questions of any king, emperor, autocrat, or 
senator of any foreign power (as to an event in which a 
British ship alone was concerned, and which did not 
even take place in the territorial waters of that power) 
passes my understanding. The only authority he is 
bound to answer is the Board of Trade. But with what 
face the Board of Trade, which, having made the regu- 
lations for 10,000 ton ships, put its dear old bald 
head under its wing for ten years, took it out only to 
shelve an important report, and with a dreary murmur 
"Unsinkable" put it back again, in the hope of not 
being disturbed for another ten years, with what face it 
will be putting questions to that man who has done 
his duty, as to the facts of this disaster and as to his 
professional conduct in it — well, I don't know ! I have 
the greatest respect for our established authorities. I 
am a disciplined man, and I have a natural indulgence 
for the weaknesses of human institutions; but I will 
own that at times I have regretted their — how shall I 
say it.f^ — their imponderability. A Board of Trade — 
what is it.f^ A Board of ... I believe the Speaker 
of the Irish Parliament is one of the members of it. A 
ghost. Less than that; as yet a mere memory. An 
office with adequate and no doubt comfortable furni- 
ture, and a lot of perfectly irresponsible gentlemen who 
exist packed in its equal atmosphere softly, as if in a lot 
of cotton- wool, and with no care in the world; for there 
can be no care without personal responsibility — such, 
for instance, as the seamen have — those seamen from 
whose mouths this irresponsible institution can take 
away the bread — as a disciplinary measure. Yes — it's 
all that. And what more.^^ The name of a politician — 
a party man! Less than nothing; a mere void without 



THE LOSS OF THE TITANIC 217 

as much as a shadow of responsibility cast into it from 
that hght in which move the masses of men who work, 
who deal in things and face the realities — not the words 
— of this life. 

Years ago I remember overhearing two genuine shell- 
backs of the old type commenting on a ship's officer, who, 
if not exactly incompetent, did not commend himself 
to their severe judgment of accomplished sailor-men. 
Said one, resuming and concluding the discussion in a 
funnily judicial tone: 

"The Board of Trade must have been drunk when 
they gave him his certificate." 

I confess that this notion of the Board of Trade as an 
entity having a brain which could be overcome by the 
fumes of strong liquor charmed me exceedingly. For 
then it would have been unlike the limited companies 
of which some exasperated wit has once said that they 
had no souls to be saved and no bodies to be kicked, and 
thus were free in this world and the next from all the 
effective sanctions of conscientious conduct. But, un- 
fortunately, the picturesque pronouncement overheard 
by me was only a characteristic sally of an annoyed 
sailor. The Board of Trade is composed of bloodless 
departments. It has no limbs and no physiognomy, or 
else at the forthcoming inquiry it might have paid to 
the victims of the Titanic disaster the small tribute of a 
blush. I ask myself whether the Marine Department 
of the Board of Trade did really believe, when they de- 
cided to shelve the report on equipment for a time, that 
a ship of 45,000 tons, that any ship, could be made 
practically indestructible by means of watertight bulk- 
heads .^^ It seems incredible to anybody who had ever 
reflected upon the properties of material, such as wood 
or steel. You can't, let builders say what they like, 
make a ship of such dimensions as strong proportion- 



ns NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

ately as a much smaller one. The shocks our old 
whalers had to stand amongst the heavy floes in Baffin's 
Bay were perfectly staggering, notwithstanding the 
most skilful handling, and yet they lasted for years. 
The Titanic, if one may believe the last reports, has only 
scraped against a piece of ice which, I suspect, was not 
an enormously bulky and comparatively easily seen 
berg, but the low edge of a floe — and sank. Leisurely 
enough, God knows — and here the advantage of bulk- 
heads comes in — for time is a great friend, a good helper 
— though in this lamentable case these bulkheads served 
only to prolong the agony of the passengers who could 
not be saved. But she sank, causing, apart from the 
sorrow and the pity of the loss of so many lives, a sort 
of surprised consternation that such a thing should 
have happened at all. Why.^ You build a 45,000 ton 
hotel of thin steel plates to secure the patronage of, say, 
a couple of thousand rich people (for if it had been for 
the emigrant trade alone, there would have been no 
such exaggeration of mere size), you decorate it in the 
style of the Pharaohs or in the Louis Quinze style — I 
don't know which — and to please the aforesaid fatuous 
handful of individuals, who have more money than they 
know what to do with, and to the applause of two conti- 
nents, you launch that mass with 2,000 people on board 
at twenty -one knots across the sea — a perfect exhibition 
of the modern blind trust in mere material and ap- 
pliances. And then this happens. General uproar. 
The blind trust in material and appliances has received a 
terrible shock. I will say nothing of the credulity which 
accepts any statement which specialists, technicians, 
and office-people are pleased to make, whether for 
purposes of gain or glory. You stand there astonished 
and hurt in your profoundest sensibilities. But what 
else under the circumstances could you expect .^^ 



THE LOSS OF THE TITANIC 219 

For my part I could much sooner believe in an un- 
sinkable ship of 3,000 tons than in one of 40,000 tons. 
It is one of those things that stand to reason. You can't 
increase the thickness of scantling and plates indefi- 
nitely. And the mere weight of this bigness is an added 
disadvantage. In reading the reports, the first re- 
flection which occurs to one is that, if that luckless 
ship had been a couple of himdred feet shorter, she 
would have probably gone clear of the danger. But 
then, perhaps, she could not have had a swimming bath 
and a French cafe. That, of course, is a serious con- 
sideration. I am well aware that those responsible for 
her short and fatal existence ask us in desolate accents 
to believe that if she had hit end on she would have sur- 
vived. Which, by a sort of coy implication, seems to 
mean that it was all the fault of the officer of the watch 
(he is dead now) for trying to avoid the obstacle. We 
shall have presently, in deference to commercial and 
industrial interests, a new kind of seamanship. A very 
new and "progressive" kind. If you see anything in 
the way, by no means try to avoid it; smash at it full 
tilt. And then — and then only you shall see the tri- 
umph of material, of clever contrivances, of the whole 
box of engineering tricks in fact, and cover with glory 
a commercial concern of the most unmitigated sort, a 
great Trust, and a great shipbuilding yard, justly famed 
for the super-excellence of its material and workman- 
ship. Unsinkable! See.? I told you she was un- 
sinkable, if only handled in accordance with the new 
seamanship. Everything's in that. And, doubtless, 
the Board of Trade, if properly approached, would con- 
sent to give the needed instructions to its examiners of 
Masters and Mates. Behold the examination-room of 
the future. Enter to the grizzled examiner a young 
man of modest aspect: "Are you well up in modem 



220 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

seamanship?" "I hope so, sir." "H'm, let's see. 
You are at night on the bridge in charge of a 150,000 
tons ship, with a motor track, organ-loft, etc., etc., with 
a full cargo of passengers, a full crew of 1,500 cafe 
waiters, two sailors and a boy, three collapsible boats as 
per Board of Trade regulations, and going at your three- 
quarter speed of, say, about forty knots. You per- 
ceive suddenly right ahead, and close to, something 
that looks like a large ice-floe. What would you do.^" 
"Put the helm amidships." "Very well. Wliy.?" 
"In order to hit end on." "On what grounds should 
you endeavour to hit end on?" "Because we are 
taught by our builders and masters that the heavier the 
smash, the smaller the damage, and because the re- 
quirements of material should be attended to." 

And so on and so on. The new seamanship: when 
in doubt try to ram fairly — whatever 's before you. 
Very simple. If only the Titanic had rammed that 
piece of ice (which was not a monstrous berg) fairly, 
every puflSng paragraph would have been vindicated in 
the eyes of the credulous public which pays. But 
would it have been? Well, I doubt it. I am well 
aware that in the 'eighties the steamship Arizona, 
one of the "greyhounds of the ocean" in the jargon of 
that day, did run bows on against a very unmistakable 
iceberg, and managed to get into port on her collision 
bulkhead. But the Arizona was not, if I remember 
rightly, 5,000 tons register, let alone 45,000, and she was 
not going at twenty knots per hour. I can't be per- 
fectly certain at this distance of time, but her sea-speed 
could not have been more than fourteen at the outside. 
Both these facts made for safety. And, even if she had 
been engined to go twenty knots, there would not have 
been behind that speed the enormous mass, so diflScult 
to check in its impetus, the terrific weight of which is 



THE LOSS OF THE TITANIC 221 

bound to do damage to itself or others at the slight- 
est contact. 

I assure you it is not for the vain pleasure of talking 
about my own poor experiences, but only to illustrate 
my point, that I will relate here a very unsensational 
little incident I witnessed now rather more than twenty 
years ago in Sydney, N.S.W. Ships were beginning 
then to grow bigger year after year, though, of course, 
the present dimensions were not even dreamt of. I was 
standing on the Circular Quay with a Sydney pilot 
watching a big mail steamship of one of our best-known 
companies being brought alongside. We admired her 
lines, her noble appearance, and were impressed by her 
* size as well, though her length, I imagine, was hardly 
half that of the Titanic. 

She came into the Cove (as that part of the harbour is 
called) , of course very slowly, and at some hundred feet 
or so short of the quay she lost her way. That quay was 
then a wooden one, a fine structure of mighty piles and 
stringers bearing a roadway — a thing of great strength. 
The ship, as I have said before, stopped moving when 
some hundred feet from it. Then her engines were 
rung on slow ahead, and immediately rung off again. 
The propeller made just about five turns, I should say. 
She began to move, stealing on, so to speak, without a 
ripple; coming alongside with the utmost gentleness. I 
went on looking her over, very much interested, but the 
man with me, the pilot, muttered under his breath: 
"Too much, too much." His exercised judgment had 
warned him of what I did not even suspect. But I be- 
lieve that neither of us was exactly prepared for what 
happened. There was a faint concussion of the ground 
under our feet, a groaning of piles, a snapping of great 
iron bolts, and with a sound of ripping and splintering, 
as when a tree is blown down by the wind, a great strong 



222 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

piece of wood, a baulk of squared timber, was displaced 
several feet as if by enchantment. I looked at my 
companion in amazement. "I could not have believed 
it," I declared. "No," he said. " You would not have 
thought she would have cracked an egg — eh?'* 

I certainly wouldn't have thought that. He shook 
his head, and added: "Ah! These great, big things, 
they want some handling." 

Some months afterwards I was back in Sydney. 
The same pilot brought me in from sea. And I found 
the same steamship, or else another as like her as two 
peas, lying at anchor not far from us. The pilot told me 
she had arrived the day before, and that he was to take 
her alongside to-morrow. I reminded him jocularly of 
the damage to the quay. "Oh!" he said, "we are not 
allowed now to bring them in under their own steam. 
We are using tugs." 

A very wise regulation. And this is my point — that 
size is to a certain extent an element of weakness. The 
bigger the ship, the more delicately she must be handled. 
Here is a contact which, in the pilot's own words, you 
wouldn't think could have cracked an egg; with the 
astonishing result of something like eighty feet of good 
strong wooden quay shaken loose, iron bolts snapped, a 
baulk of stout timber splintered. Now, suppose that 
quay had been of granite (as surely it is now) — or, in- 
stead of the quay, if there had been, say, a North Atlan- 
tic fog there, with a full-grown iceberg in it, awaiting 
the gentle contact of a ship groping its way along blind- 
fold .^^ Something would have been hurt, but it would 
not have been the iceberg. 

Apparently, there is a point in development when it 
ceases to be a true progress — in trade, in games, in the 
marvellous handiwork of men, and even in their de- 
mands and desires and aspirations of the moral and 



THE LOSS OF THE TITANIC 223 

mental kind. There is a point when progress, to re- 
main a real advance, must change slightly the direction 
of its line. But this is a wide question. What I 
wanted to point out here is — that the old Arizona, 
the marvel of her day, was proportionately stronger, 
handier, better equipped, than this triumph of modem 
naval architecture, the loss of which, in common par- 
lance, will remain the sensation of this year. The 
clatter of the presses has been worthy of the tonnage, of 
the preliminary paeans of triumph round that vanished 
hull, of the reckless statements, and elaborate descrip- 
tions of its ornate splendour. A great babble of news 
(and what sort of news too, good heavens!) and eager 
comment has arisen around this catastrophe, though it 
seems to me that a less strident note would have been 
more becoming in the presence of so many victims left 
struggling on the sea, of lives miserably thrown away 
for nothing, or worse than nothing: for false standards 
of achievement, to satisfy a vulgar demand of a few 
moneyed people for a banal hotel luxury — the only one 
they can understand — and because the big ship pays, 
in one way or another: in money or in advertising 
value. 

It is in more ways than one a very ugly business, 
and a mere scrape along the ship's side, so slight that, 
if reports are to be believed, it did not interrupt a card 
party in the gorgeously fitted (but in chaste style) 
smoking-room — ^or was it in the delightful French cafe — 
is enough to bring on the exposure. All the people on 
board existed under a sense of false security. How 
false, it has been sufficiently demonstrated. And the 
fact which seems undoubted, that some of them actually 
were reluctant to enter the boats, when told to do so, 
shows the strength of that falsehood. Incidentally, it 
shows also the sort of discipline on board these ships. 



224 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

the sort of hold kept on the passengers in the face of the 
unforgiving sea. These people seemed to imagine it an 
optional matter: whereas the order to leave the ship 
should be an order of the sternest character, to be 
obeyed unquestioningly and promptly by every one on 
board, with men to enforce it at once, and to carry it 
out methodically and swiftly. And it is no use to say 
it cannot be done, for it can. It has been done. The 
only requisite is manageableness of the ship herself and 
of the numbers she carries on board. That is the great 
thing which makes for safety. A commander should 
be able to hold his ship and everything on board of her 
in the hollow of his hand, as it were. But with the 
modern foolish trust in material, and with those floating 
hotels, this has become impossible. A man may do his 
best, but he cannot succeed in a task which from greed, 
or more likely from sheer stupidity, has been made too 
great for anybody's strength. 

The readers of The English Review, who cast a 
friendly eye nearly six years ago on my Reminiscences, 
and know how much the merchant service, ships and 
men, has been to me, will understand my indignation 
that those men of whom (speaking in no sentimental 
phrase, but in the very truth of feeling) I can't even 
now think otherwise than as brothers, have been put by 
their commercial employers in the impossibility to per- 
form efficiently their plain duty; and this from motives 
which I shall not enumerate here, but whose intrinsic 
unworthiness is plainly revealed by the greatness, the 
miserable greatness, of that disaster. Some of them 
have perished. To die for commerce is hard enough, 
but to go under that sea we have been trained to com- 
bat, with a sense of failure in the supreme duty of one's 
calling is indeed a bitter fate. Thus they are gone, and 
the responsibility remains with the living who will have 



THE LOSS OF THE TITANIC 225 

no difficulty in replacing them by others, just as good, 
at the same wages. It was their bitter fate. But I, 
who can look at some arduous years when their duty 
was my duty too, and their feelings were my feelings, 
can remember some of us who once upon a time were 
more fortunate. 

It is of them that I would talk a little, for my own 
comfort partly, and also because I am sticking all the 
time to my subject to illustrate my point, the point of 
manageableness which I have raised just now. Since 
the memory of the lucky Arizona has been evoked by 
others than myself, and made use of by me for my own 
purpose, let me call up the ghost of another ship of that 
distant day whose less lucky destiny inculcates another 
lesson making for my argument. The Douro, a ship 
belonging to the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company, 
was rather less than one-tenth the measurement of the 
Titanic. Yet, strange as it may appear to the ineffa- 
ble hotel exquisites who form the bulk of the first-class 
Cross-Atlantic Passengers, people of position and wealth 
and refinement did not consider it an intolerable hard- 
ship to travel in her, even all the way from South Amer- 
ica, this being the service she was engaged upon. Of 
her speed I know nothing, but it must have been the 
average of the period, and the decorations of her saloons 
were, I daresay, quite up to the mark; but I doubt if her 
birth had been boastfully paragraphed all round the 
Press, because that was not the fashion of the time. She 
was not a mass of material gorgeously furnished and 
upholstered. She was a ship. And she was not, in the 
apt words of an article by Commander C. Crutchley, 
R.N.R., which I have just read, "run by a sort of hotel 
syndicate composed of the Chief Engineer, the Purser, 
and the Captain," as these monstrous Atlantic ferries 
are. She was really commanded, manned, and equipped 



226 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

as a ship meant to keep the sea: a ship first and last 
in the fullest meaning of the term, as the fact I am going 
to relate will show. 

She was off the Spanish coast, homeward bound, and 
fairly full, just like the Titanic; and further, the propor- 
tion of her crew, to her passengers, I remember quite 
well, was very much the same. The exact number of 
souls on board I have forgotten. It might have been 
nearly three hundred, certainly not more. The night 
was moonlit, but hazy, the weather fine with a heavy 
swell running from the westward, which means that she 
must have been rolling a great deal, and in that respect 
the conditions for her were worse than in the case of 
the Titanic, Some time either just before or just after 
midnight, to the best of my recollection, she was run 
into amidships and at right angles by a large steamer 
which after the blow backed out, and, herself appar- 
ently damaged, remained motionless at some distance. 

My recollection is that the Douro remained afloat 
after the collision for fifteen minutes or thereabouts. 
It might have been twenty, but certainly something 
under the half -hour. In that time the boats were 
lowered, all the passengers put into them, and the lot 
shoved off. There was no time to do anything more. 
All the crew of the Douro went down with her, literally 
without a murmur. When she went she plunged bodily 
down like a stone. The only members of the ship's 
company who survived were the third officer, who was 
from the first ordered to take charge of the boats, and 
the seamen told off to man them, two in each. No- 
body else was picked up. A quartermaster, one of the 
saved in the way of duty, with whom I talked a month 
or so afterwards, told me that they pulled up to the 
spot, but could neither see a head nor hear the faintest 
cry. 



THE LOSS OF THE TITANIC 227 

But I have forgotten. A passenger was drowned. 
She was a lady's maid who, frenzied with terror, refused 
to leave the ship. One of the boats waited near by till 
the chief officer, finding himself absolutely unable to 
tear the girl away from the rail to which she clung with 
a frantic grasp, ordered the boat away out of danger. 
My quartermaster told me that he spoke over to them 
in his ordinary voice, and this was the last soimd heard 
before the ship sank. 

The rest is silence. I daresay there was the usual 
official inquiry, but who cared for it.? That sort of 
thing speaks for itself with no uncertain voice; though 
the papers, I remember, gave the event no space to 
speak of: no large headlines — no headlines at all. You 
see it was not the fashion at the time. A seaman-like 
piece of work, of which one cherishes the old memory 
at this juncture more than ever before. She was a ship 
commanded, manned, equipped — not a sort of marine 
Ritz, proclaimed unsinkable and sent adrift with its 
casual population upon the sea, without enough boats, 
without enough seamen (but with a Parisian cafe and 
four hundred of poor devils of waiters) to meet dangers 
which, let the engineers say what they like, lurk always 
amongst the waves, sent with a blind trust in mere 
material, light-heartedly, to a most miserable, most 
fatuous disaster. 

And there are, too, many ugly developments about this 
tragedy. The rush of the senatorial inquiry before the 
poor wretches escaped from the jaws of death had time 
to draw breath; the vituperative abuse of a man no more 
guilty than others in this matter, and the suspicion of 
this aimless fuss being a political move to get home 
on the M. T. Company, into which, in common parlance, 
the United States Government has got its knife; I 
don't pretend to understand why, though with the rest 



228 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

of the world I am aware of the fact. Perhaps there 
may be an excellent and worthy reason for it; but I 
venture to suggest that to take advantage of so many 
pitiful corpses, is not pretty. And the exploiting of 
the mere sensation on the other side is not pretty in its 
wealth of heartless inventions. Neither is the welter 
of Marconi lies which has not been sent vibrating with- 
out some reason, for which it would be nauseous to 
inquire too closely. And the calumnious, baseless, 
gratuitous, circumstantial lie charging poor Captain 
Smith with desertion of his post by means of suicide 
is the vilest and most ugly thing of all in this outburst 
of journalistic enterprise, without feeling, without hon- 
our, without decency. 

But all this has its moral. And that other sinking 
which I have related here and to the memory of which 
a seaman turns with relief and thankfulness has its 
moral too. Yes, material may fail, and men, too, may 
fail sometimes; but more often men, when they are 
given the chance, will prove themselves truer than 
steel, that wonderful thin steel from which the sides 
and the bulkheads of our modern sea-leviathans are 
made. 



CERTAIN ASPECTS OF 

THE ADMIRABLE INQUIRY INTO 

THE LOSS OF THE TITANIC 

1912 

I HAVE been taken to task by a friend of mine on the 
"other side" for my strictures on Senator Smith's in- 
vestigation into the loss of the Titanic, in the number 
of The English Review for May, 1912. I will admit that 
the motives of the investigation may have been excel- 
lent, and probably were; my criticism bore mainly on 
matters of form and also on the point of efficiency. In 
that respect I have nothing to retract. The Senators 
of the Commission had absolutely no knowledge and no 
practice to guide them in the conduct of such an in- 
vestigation; and this fact gave an air of unreality to 
their zealous exertions. I think that even in the 
United States there is some regret that this zeal of 
theirs was not tempered by a large dose of wisdom. It 
is fitting that people who rush with such ardour to the 
work of putting questions to men yet gasping from a 
narrow escape should have, I wouldn't say a tincture of 
technical information, but enough knowledge of the 
subject to direct the trend of their inquiry. The news- 
papers of two continents have noted the remarks of the 
President of the Senatorial Commission with comments 
which I will not reproduce here, having a scant respect 
for the "organs of public opinion," as they fondly 
believe themselves to be. The absolute value of their 
remarks was about as great as the value of the investiga- 

229 



230 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

tion they either mocked at or extolled. To the United 
States Senate I did not intend to be disrespectful. I 
have for that body, of which one hears mostly in con- 
nection with tarifiFs, as much reverence as the best ot 
Americans. To manifest more or less would be an 
impertinence in a stranger. I have expressed myself 
with less reserve on our Board of Trade. That was 
done under the influence of warm feelings. We were 
all feeling warmly on the matter at that time. But, at 
any rate, our Board of Trade inquiry, conducted by an 
experienced President, discovered a very interesting 
fact on the very second day of its sitting: the fact that 
the water-tight doors in the bulkheads of that wonder 
of naval architecture could be opened down below by 
any irresponsible person. Thus the famous closing 
apparatus on the bridge, paraded as a device of greater 
safety, with its attachments of warning bells, coloured 
lights, and all these pretty -pretties, was, in the case of 
this ship, little better than a technical farce. 

It is amusing, if anything connected with this 
stupid catastrophe can be amusing, to see the secretly 
crestfallen attitude of technicians. They are the high 
priests of the modern cult of perfected material and of 
mechanical appliances, and would fain forbid the 
profane from inquiring into its mysteries. We are the 
masters of progress, they say, and you should remain 
respectfully silent. And they take refuge behind their 
mathematics. I have the greatest regard for mathe- 
matics as an exercise of mind. It is the only manner of 
thinking which approaches the Divine. But mere 
calculations, of which these men make so much, when 
unassisted by imagination and when they have gained 
mastery over common sense, are the most deceptive 
exercises of intellect. Two and two are four, and two 
are six. That is immutable; you may trust your soul to 



THE TITANIC INQUIRY 231 

that; but you must be certain first of your quantities. 
I know how the strength of materials can be calculated 
away, and also the evidence of one's senses. For it is 
by some sort of calculation involving weights and levels 
that the technicians responsible for the Titanic per- 
suaded themselves that a ship not divided by water- 
tight compartments could be "unsinkable." Because, 
you know, she was not divided. You and I, and our 
little boys, when we want to divide, say, a box, take 
care, to procure a piece of wood which will reach from 
the bottom to the lid. We know that if it does not 
reach all the way up the box will not be divided into two 
compartments. It will be only 'partly divided. The 
Titanic was only partly divided. She was just suffi- 
ciently divided to drown some poor devils like rats in a 
trap. It is probable that they would have perished in 
any case, but it is a particularly horrible fate to die 
boxed up like this. Yes, she was sufficiently divided for 
that, but not sufficiently divided to prevent the water 
flowing over. 

Therefore to a plain man who knows something of 
mathematics but is not bemused by calculations, she 
was, from the point of view of "unsinkability," not 
divided at all. What would you say of people who 
would boast of a fireproof building, an hotel, for instance, 
saying, "Oh, we have it divided by fireproof bulkheads 
which would localise any outbreak," and if you were 
to discover on closer inspection that these bulkheads 
closed no more than two-thirds of the openings they 
were meant to close, leaving above an open space 
through which draught, smoke, and fire could rush from 
one end of the building to the other .^^ And, furthermore, 
that those partitions, being too high to climb over, the 
people confined in each menaced compartment had to 
stay there and become asphyxiated or roasted, because 



232 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 



no exits to the outside, say to the roof, had been 
provided ! What would you think of the inteUigence or 
candour of these advertising people? What would you 
think of them? And yet, apart from the obvious 
difference in the action of fire and water, the cases are 
essentially the same. 

It would strike you and me and our little boys (who 
are not engineers yet) that to approach — I won't say 
attain — somewhere near absolute safety, the divisions to 
keep out water should extend from the bottom right up 
to the uppermost deck of the hull. I repeat, the hull, 
because there are above the hull the decks of the super- 
structures of which we need not take account. And 
further, as a provision of the commonest humanity, 
that each of these compartments should have a per- 
fectly independent and free access to that uppermost 
deck: that is, into the open. Nothing less will do. 
Division by bulkheads that really divide, and free 
access to the deck from every water-tight compart- 
ment. Then the responsible man in the moment of 
danger and in the exercise of his judgment could close 
all the doors of these water-tight bulkheads by whatever 
clever contrivance has been invented for the purpose, 
without a qualm at the awful thought that he may be 
shutting up some of his fellow creatures in a death- 
trap; that he may be sacrificing the lives of men who, 
down there, are sticking to the posts of duty as the 
engine-room staffs of the Merchant Service have never 
failed to do. I know very well that the engineers of a 
ship in a moment of emergency are not quaking for 
their lives, but, as far as I have known them, attend 
calmly to their duty. We all must die; but, hang it all, 
a man ought to be given a chance, if not for his life, 
then at least to die decently. It's bad enough to have 
to stick down there when something disastrous is going 



a 



THE TITANIC INQUIRY 233 

on and any moment may be your last; but to be 
drowned shut up under deck is too bad. Some men of 
the Titanic died Hke that, it is to be feared. Compart- 
mented, so to speak. Just think what it means ! Noth- 
ing can approach the horror of that fate except being 
buried alive in a cave, or in a mine, or in your family 
vault. 

So, once more: continuous bulkheads — a clear way 
of escape to the deck out of each water-tight compart- 
ment. Nothing less. And if specialists, the precious 
specialists of the sort that builds "unsinkable ships," 
tell you that it cannot be done, don't you believe them. 
It can be done, and they are quite clever enough to do it 
too. The objections they will raise, however disguised 
in the solemn mystery of technical phrases, will not be 
technical, but commercial. I assure you that there is 
not much mystery about a ship of that sort. She is a 
tank. She is a tank ribbed, joisted, stayed, but she is 
no greater mystery than a tank. The Titanic was a tank 
eight hundred feet long, fitted as an hotel, with corri- 
dors, bedrooms, halls, and so on (not a very mysterious 
arrangement truly), and for the hazards of her existence 
I should think about as strong as a Huntley and Palmer 
biscuit-tin. I make this comparison because Huntley 
and Palmer biscuit-tins, being almost a national institu- 
tion, are probably known to all my readers. Well, 
about that strong, and perhaps not quite so strong. 
Just look at the side of such a tin, and then think of a 
50,000 ton ship, and try to imagine what the thickness 
of her plates should be to approach anywhere the 
relative solidity of that biscuit-tin. In my varied and 
adventurous career I have been thrilled by the sight of a 
Huntley and Palmer biscuit-tin kicked by a mule sky- 
high, as the saying is. It came back to earth smiling, 
with only a sort of dimple on one of its cheeks. A pro- 



234 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

portionately severe blow would have burst the side of 
the Titanic or any other "triumph of modern naval 
architecture" like brown paper — I am willing to bet. 

I am not saying this by way of disparagement. 
There is reason in things. You can't make a 50,000 ton 
ship as strong as a Huntley and Palmer biscuit-tin. But 
there is also reason in the way one accepts facts, and I 
refuse to be awed by the size of a tank bigger than any 
other tank that ever went afloat to its doom. The people 
responsible for her, though disconcerted in their hearts 
by the exposure of that disaster, are giving themselves 
airs of superiority — priests of an Oracle which has failed, 
but still must remain the Oracle. The assumption is 
that they are ministers of progress. But the mere 
increase of size is not progress. If it were, elephantiasis 
which causes a man's leg to become as large as tree- 
trunks, would be a sort of -ogress, whereas it is nothing 
but a very ugly disease Yet directly this very dis- 
concerting catastrophe 1 opened, the servants of the 
silly Oracle began to cr , "It's no use! You can't 
resist progress. The b: ; ship has come to stay." 
Well, let her stay on, then, in God's name! But she 
isn't a servant of progress in any sense. She is the 
servant of commercialism. For progress, if dealing 
with the problems of a material world, has some sort of 
moral aspect — if only, say, that of conquest, which has 
its distinct value since man is a conquering animal. But 
bigness is mere exaggeration. The men responsible for 
these big ships have been moved by considerations of 
profit to be made by the questionable means of pander- 
ing to an absurd and vulgar demand for banal luxury 
— ^the seaside hotel luxury. One even asks oneself 
whether there was such a demand .^^ It is inconceivable 
to think that there are people who can't spend five days 
of their life without a suite of apartments, cafes, bands. 



THE TITANIC INQUIRY 235 

and such-like refined delights. I suspect that the 
pubHc is not so very guilty in this matter. These 
things were pushed on to it m the usual course of trade 
competition. If to-morrow you were to take all these 
luxuries away, the public would still travel. I don't 
despair of mankind. I beheve that if by some catas- 
trophic miracle all ships of every kind were to disappear 
off the face of the waters, together with the means of 
replacing them, there would be found, before the end of 
the week, men (millionaires, perhaps) cheerfully puttmg 
out to sea in bath-tubs for a fresh start. We are all like 
that. This sort of spirit lives in mankind still uncor- 
rupted by the so-called refinements, the ingenuity of 
tradesmen, who look always for something new to sell, 

offers to the public. . i i. 

Let her stay,— I mean th^ big ship— since she has 
come to stay. I only obj t to the attitude of the 
people, who, having called ^r into being and having 
romanced (to speak polite;.^) about her assume a 
detached sort of superiority," ,.oodness only knows why, 
and raise difficulties in the \;ay of every suggestion- 
difficulties about boats, about bulkheads, about dis- 
cipline, about davits, all sorts of difficulties To most of 
them the only answer would be: "Where there s a will 
there's a way "—the most wise of proverbs. But some 
of these objections are really too stupid for anythmg. I 
shall try to give an instance of what I mean. 

This Inquiry is admirably conducted. I am not 
alludmg to the lawyers representmg "various interests, 
who are trying to earn their fees by casting all sorts of 
mean aspersions on the characters of all sorts of people 
not a bit worse than themselves. It is honest to give 
value for your wages; and the "bravos of ancient 
Venice who kept their stilettos in good order and never 
failed to deliver the stab bargained for with their em- 



2S6 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

ployers, considered themselves an honest body of 
professional men, no doubt. But they don't compel my 
admiration, whereas the conduct of this Inquiry does. 
And as it is pretty certain to be attacked, I take this 
opportunity to deposit here my nickel of appreciation. 
Well, lately, there came before it witnesses responsible 
for the designing of the ship. One of them was asked 
whether it would not be advisable to make each coal- 
bunker of the ship a water-tight compartment by means 
of a suitable door. 

The answer to such a question should have been, 
"Certainly," for it is obvious to the simplest intelli- 
gence that the more water-tight spaces you provide 
in a ship (consistently with having her workable) the 
nearer you approach safety. But instead of admitting 
the expediency of the suggestion, this witness at once 
raised an objection as to the possibility of closing 
tightly the door of a bunker on account of the slope of 
coal. This with the true expert's attitude of "My dear 
man, you don't know what you are talking about." 

Now would you believe that the objection put for- 
ward was absolutely futile? I don't know whether the 
distinguished President of the Court perceived this. 
Very likely he did, though I don't suppose he was ever 
on terms of familiarity with a ship's bunker. But I have. 
I have been inside; and you may take it that what I say 
of them is correct. I don't wish to be wearisome to the 
benevolent reader, but I want to put his finger, so to 
speak, on the inanity of the objection raised by the 
expert. A bunker is an enclosed space for holding 
coals, generally located against the ship's side, and 
having an opening, a doorway in fact, into the stoke- 
hold. Men called trimmers go in there, and by means 
of implements called slices make the coal run through 
that opening on to the floor of the stokehold, where it is 



THE TITANIC INQUIRY 237 

within reach of the stokers' (firemen's) shovels. This 
being so, you will easily understand that there is con- 
stantly a more or less thick layer of coal generally 
shaped in a slope lying in that doorway. And the 
objection of the expert was: that because of this ob- 
struction it would be impossible to close the water-tight 
door, and therefore that the thing could not be done. 
And that objection was inane. A water-tight door in 
a bulkhead may be defined as a metal plate which is 
made to close a given opening by some mechanical 
means. And if there were a law of Medes and 
Persians that a water-tight door should always slide 
downwards and never otherwise, the objection would 
be to a great extent valid. But what is there to pre- 
vent those doors to be fitted so as to move upwards, 
or horizontally, or slantwise? In which case they 
would go through the obstructing layer of coal as easily 
as a knife goes through butter. Any one may convince 
himself of it by experimenting with a light piece of 
board and a heap of stones anywhere along our roads. 
Probably the joint of such a door would weep a little 
— and there is no necessity for its being hermetically 
tight — but the object of converting bunkers into spaces 
of safety would be attained. You may take my word 
for it that this could be done without any great effort of 
ingenuity. And that is why I have qualified the ex- 
pert's objection as inane. 

Of course, these doors must not be operated from the 
bridge because of the risk of trapping the coal-trimmers 
inside the bunker; but on the signal of all other water- 
tight doors in the ship being closed (as would be done in 
case of a collision) they too could be closed on the order 
of the engineer of the watch, who would see to the safety 
of the trimmers. If the rent in the ship's side were 
within the bunker itself, that would become manifest 



238 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

enough without any signal, and the rush of water into 
the stokehold could be cut off directly the doorplate 
came into its place. Say a minute at the very outside. 
Naturally, if the blow of a right-angled collision, for 
instance, were heavy enough to smash through the 
inner bulkhead of the bunker, why, there would be then 
nothing to do but for the stokers and trimmers and 
everybody in there to clear out of the stoke-room. But 
that does not mean that the precaution of having water- 
tight doors to the bunkers is useless, superfluous, or 
impossible.^ 

And talking of stokeholds, firemen, and trimmers, 
men whose heavy labour has not a single redeeming 
feature; which is unhealthy, uninspiring, arduous, with- 
out the reward of personal pride in it; sheer, hard, 
brutalising toil, belonging neither to earth nor sea, I 
greet with joy the advent for marine purposes of the 
internal combustion engine. The disappearance of the 
marine boiler will be a real progress, which anybody in 
sympathy with his kind must welcome. Instead of the 
unthrifty, unruly, nondescript crowd the boilers re- 
quire, a crowd of men in the ship but not of her, we shall 
have comparatively small crews of disciplined, intelli- 
gent workers, able to steer the ship, handle anchors, 
man boats, and at the same time competent to take 
their place at a bench as fitters and repairers; the re- 
sourceful and skilled seamen-mechanics of the future, 
the legitimate successors of these seamen-sailors of the 
past, who had their own kind of skill, hardihood, and 
tradition and whose last days it has been my lot to 
share. 

One lives and learns and hears very surprising things 
— ^things that one hardly knows how to take, whether 

^ Since writing the above, I am told that such doors are fitted in the bunkers 
of more than one ship in the Atlantic trade. 



THE TITANIC INQUIRY 239 

seriously or jocularly, how to meet — with indignation 
or with contempt? Things said by solemn experts, by 
exalted directors, by glorified ticket-sellers, by oflScials 
of all sorts. I suppose that one of the uses of such an 
inquiry is to give such people enough rope to hang 
themselves with. And I hope that some of them won't 
neglect to do so. One of them declared two days ago 
that there was "nothing to learn from the catastrophe 
of the Titanic.''^ That he had been "giving his best 
consideration" to certain rules for ten years, and had 
come to the conclusion that nothing ever happened at 
sea, and that rules and regulations, boats and sailors, 
were unnecessary; that what was really wrong with 
the Titanic was that she carried too many boats. 

No; I am not joking. If you don't believe me, pray 
look back through the reports and you will find it all 
there. I don't recollect the official's name, but it ought 
to have been Pooh-Bah. Well, Pooh-Bah said all these 
things, and when asked whether he really meant it, 
intimated his readiness to give the subject more of "his 
best consideration" — for another ten years or so ap- 
parently — but he believed, oh yes! he was certain, that 
had there been fewer boats there would have been more 
people saved. Really, when reading the report of this 
admirably conducted Inquiry one isn't certain at times 
whether it is an Admirable Inquiry or a felicitous 
opera-bouffe of the Gilbertian type — with a rather grim 
subject, to be sure. 

Yes, rather grim — but the comic treatment never 
fails. My readers will remember that in the number of 
The English Review for May, 1912, 1 quoted the old case 
of the Arizona, and went on from that to prophesy the 
coming of a new seamanship (in a spirit of irony far 
removed from fun) at the call of the sublime builders of 
unsmkable ships. I thought that, as a small boy of my 



240 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

acquaintance says, I was "doing a sarcasm," and re- 
garded it as a rather wild sort of sarcasm at that. Well, 
I am blessed (excuse the vulgarism) if a witness has not 
turned up who seems to have been inspired by the same 
thought, and evidently longs in his heart for the advent 
of the new seamanship. He is an expert, of course, and 
I rather believe he's the same gentleman who did not 
see his way to fit water-tight doors to bunkers. With 
ludicrous earnestness he assured the Commission of 
his intense belief that had only the Titanic struck end- 
on she would have come into port all right. And 
in the whole tone of his insistent statement there was 
suggested the regret that the officer in charge (who is 
dead now, and mercifully outside the comic scope of this 
Inquiry) was so ill-advised as to try to pass clear of the 
ice. Thus my sarcastic prophecy, that such a sug- 
gestion was sure to turn up, receives an unexpected 
fulfilment. You will see yet that in deference to the de- 
mands of "progress" the theory of the new seamanship 
will become established: "Whatever you see in front of 
you — ram it fair . . . ." The new seamanship! 
Looks simple, doesn't it.^^ But it will be a very exact art 
indeed. The proper handling of an unsinkable ship, 
you see, will demand that she should be made to hit the 
iceberg very accurately with her nose, because should 
you perchance scrape the blujff of the bow instead, she 
may, without ceasing to be as unsinkable as before, find 
her way to the bottom. I congratulate the future 
Transatlantic passengers on the new and vigorous sen- 
sations in store for them. They shall go bounding across 
from iceberg to iceberg at twenty -five knots with preci- 
sion and safety, and a "cheerful bumpy sound" — as the 
immortal poem has it. It will be a teeth-loosening, ex- 
hilarating experience. The decorations will be Louis- 
Quinze, of course, and the cafe shall remain open all 



THE TITANIC INQUIRY 241 

night. But what about the priceless Sevres porcelain 
and the Venetian glass provided for the service of 
Transatlantic passengers? Well, I am afraid all that 
will have to be replaced by silver goblets and plates. 
Nasty, common, cheap silver. But those who will go 
to sea must be prepared to put up with a certain 
amount of hardship. 

And there shall be no boats. Why should there be no 
boats.? Because Pooh-Bah has said that the fewer the 
boats, the more people can be saved; and therefore with 
no boats at all, no one need be lost. But even if there 
was a flaw in this argument, pray look at the other 
advantages the absence of boats gives you. There can't 
be the annoyance of having to go into them in the 
middle of the night, and the unpleasantness, after saving 
your life by the skin of your teeth, of being hauled over 
the coals by irreproachable members of the Bar with 
hints that you are no better than a cowardly scoundrel 
and your wife a heartless monster. Less Boats. No 
boats ! Great should be the gratitude of passage-selling 
Combines to Pooh-Bah; and they ought to cherish his 
memory when he dies. But no fear of that. His kind 
never dies. All you have to do, O Combine, is to knock 
at the door of the Marine Department, look in, and 
beckon to the first man you see. That will be he, very 
much at your service — prepared to affirm after "ten 
years of my best consideration" and a bundle of statis- 
tics in hand, that: "There's no lesson to be learned, 
and that there is nothing to be done!" 

On an earlier day there was another witness before 
the Court of Inquiry. A mighty official of the White 
Star Line. The impression of his testimony which the 
Report gave is of an almost scornful impatience with all 
this fuss and pother. Boats ! Of course we have crowded 
our decks with them in answer to this ignorant clamour. 



242 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

Mere lumber ! How can we handle so many boats with 
our davits? Your people don't know the conditions of 
the problem. We have given these matters our best 
consideration, and we have done what we thought 
reasonable. We have done more than our duty. We 
are wise, and good, and impeccable. And whoever says 
otherwise is either ignorant or wicked. 

This is the gist of these scornful answers which dis- 
close the psychology of commercial undertakings. It is 
the same psychology which fifty or so years ago, before 
Samuel Plimsoll uplifted his voice, sent overloaded ships 
to sea. "Why shouldn't we cram in as much cargo as 
our ships will hold.^^ Look how few, how very few of 
them get lost, after all." 

Men don't change. Not very much. And the only 
answer to be given to this manager who came out, im- 
patient and indignant, from behind the plate-glass 
windows of his shop to be discovered by this Inquiry, 
and to tell us that he, they, the whole three million (or 
thirty million, for all I know) capital Organisation for 
selling passages, has considered the problem of boats — 
the only answer to give him is : that this is not a prob- 
lem of boats at all. It is the problem of decent be- 
haviour. If you can't carry or handle so many boats, 
then don't cram quite so many people on board. It is 
as simple as that — this problem of right feeling and 
right conduct, the real nature of which seems beyond 
the comprehension of ticket-providers. Don't sell so 
many tickets, my virtuous dignitary. After all, men 
and women (unless considered from a purely com- 
mercial point of view) are not exactly the cattle of the 
Western-ocean trade, that used some twenty years ago 
to be thrown overboard on an emergency and left to 
swim round and round before they sank. If you can't 
get more boats, then sell less tickets. Don't drown so 



THE TITANIC INQUIRY 243 

many people on the finest, calmest night that was ever 
known in the North Atlantic — even if you have pro- 
vided them with a little music to get drowned by. Sell 
less tickets! That's the solution of the problem, your 
Mercantile Highness. 

But there would be a cry, "Oh! This requires con- 
sideration!" (Ten years of it — eh.^) Well, no! This 
does not require consideration. This is the very first 
thing to do. At once. Limit the number of people 
by the boats you can handle. That's honesty. And 
then you may go on fumbling for years about these 
precious davits which are such a stumbling-block to your 
humanity. These fascinating patent davits. These 
davits that refuse to do three times as much work as 
they were meant to do. Oh! The wickedness of these 
davits ! 

One of the great discoveries of this admirable Inquiry 
is the fascination of the davits. All these people 
positively can't get away from them. They shuffle 
about and groan around their davits. Whereas the 
obvious thing to do is to eliminate the man-handled 
davits altogether. Don't you think that with all the 
mechanical contrivances, with all the generated power 
on board these ships, it is about time to get rid of the 
hundred-years-old, man-power appliances? Cranes are 
what is wanted, low, compact cranes with adjustable 
heads, one to each set of six or nine boats. And if 
people tell you of insuperable difficulties, if they tell 
you of the swing and spin of spanned boats, don't you 
believe them. The heads of the cranes need not be any 
higher than the heads of the davits. The lift required 
would be only a couple of inches. As to the spin, there 
is a way to prevent that if you have in each boat two 
men who know what they are about. I have taken up 
on board a heavy ship's boat, in the open sea (the ship 



244 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

rolling heavily), with a common cargo derrick. And a 
cargo derrick is very much like a crane; but a crane de- 
vised ad hoc would be infinitely easier to work. We 
must remember that the loss of this ship has altered the 
moral atmosphere. As long as the Titanic is re- 
membered, an ugly rush for the boats may be feared 
in case of some accident. You can't hope to drill into 
perfect discipline a casual mob of six hundred firemen 
and waiters, but in a ship like the Titanic you can keep 
on a permanent trustworthy crew of one hundred in- 
telligent seamen and mechanics who would know their 
stations for abandoning ship and would do the work 
efficiently. The boats could be lowered with sufficient 
dispatch. One does not want to let rip one's boats by 
the run all at the same time. With six boat-cranes, 
six boats would be simultaneously swung, filled, and got 
away from the side; and if any sort of order is kept, the 
ship could be cleared of the passengers in a quite short 
time. For there must be boats enough for the passen- 
gers and crew, whether you increase the number of 
boats or limit the number of passengers, irrespective 
of the size of the ship. That is the only honest course. 
Any other would be rather worse than putting sand in 
the sugar, for which a tradesman gets fined or im- 
prisoned. Do not let us take a romantic view of the so- 
called progress. A company selling passages is a 
tradesman; though from the way these people talk and 
behave you would think they are benefactors of man- 
kind in some mysterious way, engaged in some lofty 
and amazing enterprise. 

All these boats should have a motor-engine in them. 
And, of course, the glorified tradesman, the mummified 
official, the technicians, and all these secretly dis- 
concerted hangers-on to the enormous ticket-selling 
enterprise, will raise objections to it with every air of 



THE TITANIC INQUIRY 245 

superiority. But don't believe them. Doesn't it strike 
you as absurd that in this age of mechanical propulsion, 
of generated power, the boats of such ultra-modem 
ships are fitted with oars and sails, implements more 
than three thousand years old.^^ Old as the siege of 
Troy. Older ! . . . And I know what I am talking 
about. Only six weeks ago I was on the river in an 
ancient, rough, ship's boat, fitted with a two-cylinder 
motor-engine of 7| h.p. Just a common ship's boat, 
which the man who owns her uses for taking the work- 
men and stevedores to and from the ships loading at 
the buoys off Greenhithe. She would have carried 
some thirty people. No doubt has carried as many 
daily for many months. And she can tow a twenty- 
five ton water barge — which is also part of that man's 
business. 

It was a boisterous day, half a gale of wind against 
the flood tide. Two fellows managed her. A young- 
ster of seventeen was cox (and a first-rate cox he was 
too) ; a fellow in a torn blue jersey, not much older, of 
the usual riverside type, looked after the engine. I 
spent an hour and a half in her, running up and down 
and across that reach. She handled perfectly. With 
eight or twelve oars out she could not have done any- 
thing like as well. These two youngsters at my re- 
quest kept her stationary for ten minutes, with a touch 
of engine and helm now and then, within three feet of a 
big, ugly mooring buoy over which the water broke 
and the spray flew in sheets, and which would have 
holed her if she had bumped against it. But she kept 
her position, it seemed to me, to an inch, without 
apparently any trouble to these boys. You could 
not have done it with oars. And her engine did not 
take up the space of three men, even on the assumption 
that you would pack people as tight as sardines in a box. 



246 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

Not the room of three people, I tell you ! But no one 
would want to pack a boat like a sardine-box. There 
must be room enough to handle the oars. But in that 
old ship's boat, even if she had been desperately over- 
crowded, there was power (manageable by two riverside 
youngsters) to get away quickly from a ship's side (very 
important for your safety and to make room for other 
boats), the power to keep her easily head to sea, the 
power to move at ^ve to seven knots towards a rescu- 
ing ship, the power to come safely alongside. And all 
that in an engine which did not take up the room of 
three people. 

A poor boatman who had to scrape together painfully 
the few sovereigns of the price had the idea of putting 
that engine into his boat. But all these designers, 
directors, managers, constructors, and others whom 
we may include in the generic name of Yamsi, never 
thought of it for the boats of the biggest tank on earth, 
or rather on sea. And therefore they assume an air of 
impatient superiority and make objections — ^however 
sick at heart they may be. And I hope they are; at 
least, as much as a grocer who has sold a tin of imperfect 
salmon which destroyed only half a dozen people. And 
you know, the tinning of salmon was "progress" as much 
at least as the building of the Titanic. More, in fact. 
I am not attacking shipowners. I care neither more 
nor less for Lines, Companies, Combines, and generally 
for Trade arrayed in purple and fine linen than the 
Trade cares for me. But I am attacking foolish arro- 
gance, which is fair game; the offensive posture of 
superiority by which they hide the sense of their guilt 
while the echoes of the miserably hypocritical cries 
along the alley-ways of that ship: "Any more women? 
Any more women?" linger yet in our ears. 

I have been expecting from one or the other of them 



THE TITANIC INQUIRY 247 

all bearing the generic name of Yamsi, something, a 
sign of some sort, some sincere utterance, in the course 
of this Admirable Inquiry, of manly, of genuine com- 
punction. In vain. All trade talk. Not a whisper — 
except for the conventional expression of regret at the 
beginning of the yearly report — which otherwise is a 
cheerful document. Dividends, you know. The shop 
is doing well. 

And the Admiral Inquiry goes on, punctuated by 
idiotic laughter, by paid-for cries of indignation from 
under legal wigs, bringing to light the psychology of 
various commercial characters too stupid to know that 
they are giving themselves away — an admirably labo- 
rious Inquiry into facts that speak, nay shout, for them- 
selves. 

I am not a soft-headed, humanitarian faddist. I have 
been ordered in my time to do dangerous work; I have 
ordered others to do dangerous work; I have never 
ordered a man to do any work I was not prepared to do 
myself. I attach no exaggerated value to human life. 
But I know it has a value for which the most generous 
contributions to the Mansion House and "Heroes" 
funds cannot pay. And they cannot pay for it, because 
people, even of the third class (excuse my plain speak- 
ing), are not cattle. Death has its sting. If Yamsi's 
manager's head were forcibly held under the water of 
his bath for some little time, he would soon discover 
that it has. Some people can only learn from that sort 
of experience which comes home to their own dear 
selves. 

I am not a sentimentalist; therefore it is not a great 
consolation to me to see all these people breveted as 
"Heroes" by the penny and halfpenny Press. It is no 
consolation at all. In extremity, in the worst ex- 
tremity, the majority of people, even of common people. 



248 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

will behave decently. It's a fact of which only the 
journalists don't seem aware. Hence their enthusiasm, 
I suppose. But I, who am not a sentimentalist think 
it would have been finer if the band of the Titanic had 
been quietly saved, instead of being drowned while 
playing — whatever tune they were playing, the poor 
devils. I would rather they had been saved to support 
their families than to see their families supported by the 
magnificent generosity of the subscribers. I am not 
consoled by the false, written-up, Drury Lane aspects 
of that event, which is neither drama, nor melodrama, 
nor tragedy, but the exposure of arrogant folly. There 
is nothing more heroic in being drowned very much 
against your will, off a holed, helpless, big tank in which 
you bought your passage, than in dying of colic caused 
by the imperfect salmon in the tin you bought from 
your grocer. 

And that's the truth. The unsentimental truth 
stripped of the romantic garment the Press has wrapped 
around this most unnecessary disaster. 



PROTECTION OF OCEAN LINERS i 

1914 

The loss of the Empress of Ireland awakens feelings 
somewhat different from those the sinking of the Titanic 
had called up on tw^o continents. The grief for the lost 
and the sympathy for the survivors and the bereaved 
are the same; but there is not, and there cannot be, the 
same undercurrent of indignation. The good ship that 
is gone (I remember reading of her launch something 
like eight years ago) had not been ushered in with beat 
of drum as the chief wonder of the world of waters. 
The company who owned her had no agents, authorised 
or unauthorised, giving boastful interviews about her 
unsinkability to newspaper reporters ready to swallow 
any sort of trade statement if only sensational enough 
for their readers — readers as ignorant as themselves of 
the nature of all things outside the commonest experi- 
ence of the man in the street. 

No; there was nothing of that in her case. The 
company was content to have as fine, staunch, sea- 
worthy a ship as the technical knowledge of that time 
could make her. In fact, she was as safe a ship as nine 
hundred and ninety-nine ships out of any thousand 
now afloat upon the sea. No; whatever sorrow one 
can feel, one does not feel indignation. This was not 
an accident of a very boastful marine transportation; 
this was a real casualty of the sea. The indignation 
of the New South Wales Premier flashed telegraphically 

*The loss of the Empress of Ireland. 

249 



250 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

to Canada is perfectly uncalled-for. That statesman, 
whose sympathy for poor mates and seamen is so 
suspect to me that I wouldn't take it at fifty per cent.: 
discount, does not seem to know that a British Court 
of Marine Inquiry, ordinary or extraordinary, is not 
a contrivance for catching scapegoats. I, who have 1 1 
been seaman, mate and master for twenty years, hold- 
ing my certificate under the Board of Trade, may 
safely say that none of us ever felt in danger of un- 
fair treatment from a Court of Inquiry. It is a per- 
fectly impartial tribunal which has never punished sea- 
men for the faults of shipowners — as, indeed, it could 
not do even if it wanted to. And there is another thing 
the angry Premier of New South Wales does not know. 
It is this: that for a ship to float for fifteen minutes 
after receiving such a blow by a bare stem on her bare 
side is not so bad. 

She took a tremendous list which made the minutes of 
grace vouchsafed her of not much use for the saving of 
lives. But for that neither her owners nor her officers 
are responsible. It would have been wonderful if she 
had not listed with such a hole in her side. Even the 
Aquitania with such an opening in her outer hull would 
be bound to take a list. I don't say this with the inten- 
tion of disparaging this latest "triumph of marine archi- 
tecture" — to use the consecrated phrase. The Aquitania 
is a magnificent ship. I believe she would bear her peo- 
ple unscathed through ninety -nine per cent, of all possi- 
ble accidents of the sea. But suppose a collision out on 
the ocean involving damage as extensive as this one was, 
and suppose then a gale of wind coming on. Even the 
Aquitania would not be quite seaworthy, for she would 
not be manageable. 

We have been accustoming ourselves to put our trust 
in material, technical skill, invention, and scientific 



PROTECTION OF OCEAN LINERS 251 

contrivances to such an extent that we have come at 
last to beheve that with these things we can overcome 
the immortal gods themselves. Hence when a disaster 
like this happens, there arises, besides the shock to 
our humane sentiments, a feeling of irritation, such 
as the hon. gentleman at the head of the New South 
Wales Government has discharged in a telegraphic 
flash upon the world. 

But it is no use being angry and trying to hang a 
threat of penal servitude over the heads of the directors 
of shipping companies. You can't get the better of the 
immortal gods by the mere power of material con- 
trivances. There will be neither scapegoats in this 
matter nor yet penal servitude for any one. The 
Directors of the Canadian Pacific Railway Company 
did not sell "safety at sea" to the people on board the 
Empress of Ireland. They never in the slightest degree 
pretended to do so. What they did was to sell them a 
sea-passage, giving very good value for the money. 
Nothing more. As long as men will travel on the water, 
the sea-gods will take their toll. They will catch good 
seamen napping, or confuse their judgment by arts 
well known to those who go to sea, or overcome them by 
the sheer brutality of elemental forces. It seems to me 
that the resentful sea-gods never do sleep, and are never 
weary; wherein the seamen who are mere mortals con- 
demned to unending vigilance are no match for them. 

And yet it is right that the responsibility should be 
fixed. It is the fate of men that even in their contests 
with the immortal gods they must render an account of 
their conduct. Life at sea is the life in which, simple as 
it is, you can't afford to make mistakes. 

With whom the mistake lies here, is not for me to say. 
I see that Sir Thomas Shaughnessy has expressed his 
opinion of Captain Kendall's absolute innocence. This 



252 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

statement, premature as it is, does him honour, for I 
don't suppose for a moment that the thought of the 
material issue involved in the verdict of the Court of 
Inquiry influenced him in the least. I don't suppose 
that he is more impressed by the writ of 2,000,000 
dollars nailed (or more likely pasted) to the foremast of 
the Norwegian than I am, who don't believe that the 
Storstad is worth 2,000,000 shillings. This is merely a 
move of commercial law, and even the whole majesty 
of the British Empire (so finely invoked by the Sheriff) 
cannot squeeze more than a very moderate quantity of 
blood out of a stone. Sir Thomas, in his confident pro- 
nouncement, stands loyally by a loyal and distinguished 
servant of his company. 

This thing has to be investigated yet, and it is not 
proper for me to express my opinion, though I have one, 
in this place and at this time. But I need not conceal 
my sympathy with the vehement protestations of 
Captain Andersen. A charge of neglect and indifference 
in the matter of saving lives is the cruellest blow that 
can be aimed at the character of a seaman worthy of the 
name. On the face of the facts as known up to now the 
charge does not seem to be true. If upwards of three 
hundred people have been, as stated in the last reports, 
saved by the Storstad, then that ship must have been 
at hand and rendering all the assistance in her power. 

As to the point which must come up for the decision 
of the Court of Inquiry, it is as fine as a hair. The two 
ships saw each other plainly enough before the fog 
closed on them. No one can question Captain Ken- 
dall's prudence. He has been as prudent as ever he 
could be. There is not a shadow of doubt as to that. 

But there is this question : Accepting the position of 
the two ships when they saw each other as correctly 
described in the very latest newspaper reports, it seems 



PROTECTION OF OCEAN LINERS 253 

clear that it was the Empress of Ireland^ s duty to keep 
clear of the collier, and what the Court will have to 
decide is whether the stopping of the liner was, under 
the circumstances, the best way of keeping her clear of 
the other ship, which had the right to proceed cau- 
tiously on an unchanged course. 

This, reduced to its simplest expression, is the ques- 
tion which the Court will have to decide. 

And now, apart from all problems of manoeuvring, of 
rules, of the road, of the judgment of the men in com- 
mand, away from their possible errors and from the 
points the Court will have to decide, if we ask ourselves 
what it was that was needed to avert this disaster cost- 
ing so many lives, spreading so much sorrow, and to a 
certain point shocking the public conscience — if we ask 
that question, what is the answer to be.^^ 

I hardly dare set it down. Yes; what was it that 
was needed, what ingenious combinations of ship- 
building, what transverse bulkheads, what skill, what 
genius — how much expense in money and trained think- 
ing, what learned contriving, to avert that disaster .f^ 

To save that ship, all these lives, so much anguish 
for the dying, and so much grief for the bereaved, all 
that was needed in this particular case in the way of 
science, money, ingenuity, and seamanship was a man 
and a cork-fender. 

Yes; a man, a quartermaster, an able seaman that 
would know how to jump to an order and was not an 
excitable fool. In my time at sea there was no lack of 
men in British ships who could jump to an order and 
were not excitable fools. As to the so-called cork-fen- 
der, it is a sort of soft balloon made from a net of thick 
rope rather more than a foot in diameter. It is such 
a long time since I have indented for cork-fenders that 
I don't remember how much these things cost apiece. 



^54 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

One of them, hung judiciously over the side at the end 
of its lanyard by a man who knew what he was about, 
might perhaps have saved from destruction the ship 
and upwards of a thousand lives. 

Two men with a heavy rope -fender would have been 
better, but even the other one might have made all the 
difference between a very damaging accident and down- 
right disaster. By the time the cork-fender had been 
squeezed between the liner's side and the bluff of the ., 
Siorstad's bow, the effect of the latter 's reversed pro- || 
peller would have been produced, and the ships would ' 
have come apart with no more damage than bulged 
and started plates. Wasn't there lying about on that 
liner's bridge, fitted with all sorts of scientific contriv- 
ances, a couple of simple and effective cork-fenders — 
or on board of that Norwegian either.^ There must 
have been, since one ship was just out of a dock or 
harbour and the other just arriving. That is the time, 
if ever, when cork-fenders are lying about a ship's 
decks. And there was plenty of time to use them, and 
exactly in the conditions in which such fenders are effect- 
ively used. The water was as smooth as in any dock; 
one ship was motionless, the other just moving at what 
may be called dock-speed when entering, leaving, or 
shifting berths; and from the moment the collision was 
seen to be unavoidable till the actual contact a whole 
minute elapsed. A minute, — an age under the circum- 
stances. And no one thought of the homely expedient 
of dropping a simple, unpretending rope-fender be- 
tween the destructive stem and the defenceless side! 

I appeal confidently to all the seamen in the still 
United Kingdom, from his Majesty the King (who has 
been really at sea) to the youngest intelligent A.B. in 
any ship that will dock next tide in the ports of this 
realm, whether there was not a chance there. I have 




PROTECTION OF OCEAN LINERS ^55 

followed the sea for more than twenty years; I have 
seen collisions; I have been involved in a collision 
myself; and I do believe that in the case under con- 
sideration this little thing would have made all that 
enormous difference — the difference between consid- 
erable damage and an appalling disaster. 

Many letters have been written to the Press on the 
subject of collisions. I have seen some. They contain 
many suggestions, valuable and otherwise; but there is 
only one which hits the nail on the head. It is a letter 
to the Times from a retired Captain of the Royal Navy. 
It is printed in small type, but it deserved to be printed 
in letters of gold and crimson. The writer suggests that 
all steamers should be obliged by law to carry hung over 
their stem what we at sea call a "pudding." 

This solution of the problem is as wonderful in its 
simplicity as the celebrated trick of Columbus's egg, 
and infinitely more useful to mankind. A "pudding" 
is a thing something like a bolster of stout rope-net 
stuffed with old junk, but thicker in the middle than at 
the ends. It can be seen on almost every tug working in 
our docks. It is, in fact, a fixed rope-fender always in 
a position where presumably it would do most good. 
Had the Storstad carried such a "pudding" proportion- 
ate to her size (say, two feet diameter in the thickest 
part) across her stem, and hung above the level of her 
hawse-pipes, there would have been an accident cer- 
tainly, and some repair-work for the nearest ship-yard, 
but there would have been no loss of life to deplore. 

It seems almost too simple to be true, but I assure 
you that the statement is as true as anything can be. 
We shall see whether the lesson will be taken to heart. 
We shall see. There is a Commission of learned men 
sitting to consider the subject of saving life at sea. 
They are discussing bulkheads, boats, davits, manning. 



^56 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

navigation, but I am willing to bet that not one of them 
has thought of the humble "pudding." They can 
make what rules they like. We shall see if, with that 
disaster calling aloud to them, they will make the rule ! 
that every steamship should carry a permanent fender 
across her stem, from two to four feet in diameter in its 
thickest part in proportion to the size of the ship. But 
perhaps they may think the thing too rough and un- , 
sightly for this scientific and sesthetic age. It certainly I 
won't look very pretty but I make bold to say it will 
save more lives at sea than any amount of the Marconi | 
installations which are being forced on the shipowners 
on that very ground — the safety of lives at sea. 
We shall see! 

To the Editor of the Daily Express. 

Sir, 

As I fully expected, this morning's post brought me 
not a few letters on the subject of that article of mine 
in the Illustrated London News. And they are very 
much what I expected them to be. 

I shall address my reply to Captain Littlehales, 
since obviously he can speak with authority, and 
speaks in his own name, not under a pseudonym. 
And also for the reason that it is no use talking to men 
who tell you to shut your head for a confounded fool. 
They are not likely to listen to you. 

But if there be in Liverpool anybody not too angry 
to listen, I want to assure him or them that my ex- 
clamatory line, "Was there no one on board either of 
these ships to think of dropping a fender — etc." was not 
uttered in the spirit of blame for any one. I would 
not dream of blaming a seaman for doing or omitting 
to do anything a person sitting in a perfectly safe and 



PROTECTION OF OCEAN LINERS 257 

unsinkable study may think of. All my sympathy 
goes to the two captains; much the greater share of it 
to Captain Kendall, who has lost his ship and whose 
load of responsibility was so much heavier! I may not 
know a great deal, but I know how anxious and per- 
plexing are those nearly end-on approaches, so infinitely 
more trying to the men in charge than a frank right- 
angle crossing. 

I may begin by reminding Captain Littlehales that I, 
as well as himself, have had to form my opinion, or 
rather my vision, of the accident, from printed state- 
ments, of which many must have been loose and inexact, 
and none could have been minutely circumstantial. I 
have read the reports of the Times and the Daily 
Telegraph, and no others. What stands in the columns 
of these papers is responsible for my conclusion — or 
perhaps for the state of my feelings when I wrote the 
Illustrated London News article. 

From these sober and unsensational reports, I derived 
the impression that this collision was a collision of the 
slowest sort. I take it, of course, that both the men in 
charge speak the strictest truth as to preliminary facts. 
We know that the Empress of Ireland was for a time 
lying motionless. And if the captain of the Storstad 
stopped his engines directly the fog came on (as he says 
he did), then taking into account the adverse current of 
the river, the Storstad, by the time the two ships 
sighted each other again, must have been barely moving 
over the ground. The "over the ground" speed is the 
only one that matters in this discussion. In fact, I 
represented her to myself as just creeping on ahead — no 
more. This, I contend, is an imaginative view (and we 
can form no other) not utterly absurd for a seaman to 
adopt. 

So much for the imaginative view of the sad occur- 



258 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

rence which caused me to speak of the fender, and be 
chided for it in unmeasured terms. Not by Captain 
Littlehales, however, and I wish to reply to what he 
says with all possible deference. His illustration bor- 
rowed from boxing is very apt, and in a certain sense 
makes for my contention. Yes. A blow delivered with 
a boxing-glove will draw blood or knock a man out; but 
it would not crush in his nose flat or break his jaw for 
him — at least, not always. And this is exactly my 
point. 

Twice in my sea life I have had occasion to be im- 
pressed by the preserving effect of a fender. Once I 
was myself the man who dropped it over. Not because 
I was so very clever or smart, but simply because I 
happened to be at hand. And I agree with Captain 
Littlehales that to see a steamer's stem coming at you 
at the rate of only two knots is a staggering experience. 
The thing seems to have power enough behind it to cut 
half through the terrestrial globe. 

And perhaps Captain Littlehales is right .^^ It may 
be that I am mistaken in my appreciation of circum- 
stances and possibilities in this case — or in any such case. 
Perhaps what was really wanted there was an extraor- 
dinary man and an extraordinary fender. I care noth- 
ing if possibly my deep feeling has betrayed me into 
something which some people call absurdity. 

Absurd was the word applied to the proposal for 
carrying "enough boats for all" on board the big liners. 
And my absurdity can affect no lives, break no bones — 
need make no one angry. Why should I care, then, as 
long as out of the discussion of my absurdity there will 
emerge the acceptance of the suggestion of Captain F. 
Papillon, R. N., for the universal and compulsory fit- 
ting of very heavy collision fenders on the stems of all 
mechanically propelled ships .^^ 



PROTECTION OF OCEAN LINERS 259 

An extraordinary man we cannot always get from 
heaven on order, but an extraordinary fender that will 
do its work is well within the power of a committee of 
old boatswains to plan out, make, and place in position. 
I beg to ask, not in a provocative spirit, but simply as to 
a matter of fact which he is better qualified to judge 
than I am — Will Captain Littlehales affirm that if the 
Storstad had carried, slung securely across the stem, even 
nothing thicker than a single bale of wool (an ordinary, 
hand'pressed, Australian wool-bale), it would have 
made no difference? 

If scientific men can invent an air cushion, a gas 
»i cushion, or even an electricity cushion (with wires or 
without), to fit neatly round the stems and bows of 
ships, then let them go to work in God's name and 
produce another "marvel of science" without loss of 
time. For something like this has long been due — too 
long for the credit of that part of mankind which is not 
absurd, and in which I include, among others, such 
people as marine underwriters, for instance. 

Meanwhile, turning to materials I am familiar with, I 
would put my trust in canvas, lots of big rope, and in 
large, very large quantities of old junk. 

It sounds awfully primitive, but if it will mitigate 
the mischief in only fifty per cent, of cases, is it not well 
worth trying .f^ Most collisions occur at slow speeds, and 
it ought to be remembered that in case of a big liner's 
loss, involving many lives, she is generally sunk by a 
ship much smaller than herself. 

Joseph Conrad. 



A FRIENDLY PLACE 

Eighteen years have passed since I last set foot in 
the London Sailors' Home. I was not staying there 
then ; I had gone in to try to find a man I wanted to see. 
He was one of those able seamen who, in a watch, are a 
perfect blessing to a young officer. I could perhaps 
remember here and there among the shadows of my sea- 
life a more daring man, or a more agile man, or a man 
more expert in some special branch of his calling — 
such as wire splicing, for instance; but for all-round 
competence, he was unequalled. As character he was 
sterling stuff. His name was Anderson. He had a 
fine, quiet face, kindly eyes, and a voice which matched 
that something attractive in the whole man. Though 
he looked yet in the prime of life, shoulders, chest, 
limbs untouched by decay, and though his hair and 
moustache were only iron-grey, he was on board ship 
generally called Old Andy by his fellows. He accepted 
the name with some complacency. 

I made my enquiry at the highly glazed entry office. 
The clerk on duty opened an enormous ledger, and after 
running his finger down a page, informed me that Ander- 
son had gone to sea a week before, in a ship bound round 
the Horn. Then, smiling at me, he added: "Old 
Andy. We know him well, here. What a nice fellow !" 

I, who knew what a "good man," in a sailor sense, he 
was, assented without reserve. Heaven only knows 
when, if ever, he came back from that voyage, to the 
Sailors' Home of which he was a faithful client. 

260 



A FRIENDLY PLACE 261 

I went out glad to know he was safely at sea, but 
sorry not to have seen him; though, indeed, if I had, we 
would not have exchanged more than a score of words, 
perhaps. He was not a talkative man. Old Andy, 
whose affectionate ship-name clung to him even in that 
Sailors' Home, where the staff understood and liked the 
sailors (those men without a home) and did its duty by 
them with an unobtrusive tact, with a patient and 
humorous sense of their idiosyncrasies, to which I 
hasten to testify now, when the very existence of that 
institution is menaced after so many years of most 

useful work. 

Walking away from it on that day eighteen years ago, 
I was far from thinking it was for the last time. Great 
changes have come since, over land and sea; and if I 
were to seek somebody who knew Old Andy it would be 
(of all people in the world) Mr. John Galsworthy. 
For Mr. John Galsworthy, Andy, and myself have been 
shipmates together in our different stations, for some 
forty days in the Lidian Ocean in the early nineties. 
And, but for us two. Old Andy's very memory would 
be gone from this changing earth. 

Yes, things have changed— the very sky, the atmos- 
phere, the hght of judgment which falls on the labours 
of men, either splendid or obscure. Having been asked 
to say a word to the public on behalf of the Sailors' 
Home, I felt immensely flattered— and troubled. 
Flattered to have been thought of in that connection; 
troubled to find myself in touch again with that past so 
deeply rooted in my heart. And the illusion of nearness 
is so great while I trace these lines that I feel as if I were 
speaking in the name of that worthy Sailor-Shade of Old 
Andy, whose faithfully hard life seems to my vision a 
thing of yesterday. 

***** 



262 NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS 

But though the past keeps firm hold on one, yet one 
feels with the same warmth that the men and the 
institutions of to-day have their merit and their claims. 
Others will know how to set forth before the public the 
merit of the Sailors' Home in the eloquent terms of hard 
facts and some few figures. For myself, I can only 
bring a personal note, give a glimpse of the human side 
of the good work for sailors ashore, carried on through I' 
so many decades with a perfect understanding of the 
end in view. I have been in touch with the Sailors' 
Home for sixteen years of my life, off and on; I have 
seen the changes in the staff and I have observed the 
subtle alterations in the physiognomy of that stream of 
sailors passing through it, in from the sea and out again 
to sea, between the years 1878 and 1894. I have listened 
to the talk on the decks of ships in all latitudes, when its 
name would turn up frequently, and if I had to charac- 
terise its good work in one sentence, I would say that, 
for seamen, the Well Street Home was a friendly place. 

It was essentially just that; quietly, unobtrusively, 
with a regard for the independence of the men who 
sought its shelter ashore, and with no ulterior aims be- 
hind that effective friendliness. No small merit this. 
And its claim on the generosity of the public is derived 
from a long record of valuable public service. Since 
we are all agreed that the men of the Merchant Service 
are a national asset worthy of care and sympathy, the 
public could express this sympathy no better than by 
enabling the Sailors' Home, so useful in the past, to 
continue its friendly offices to the seamen of future 
generations. 

THE END 



3^77~7 



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